A Typology of Word Categories(62) go+en (= gone)
drive+en (= driven)
hope+en (= hoped)
put+en (= put)
The progressive aspect is fortunately more regular and, in fact, it is always formed by
adding ing to the stem. Finally, verbs have a passive form as well. This is always
identical to the perfective however:
(63) a he had driven the car the car was driven down the road
b he had hoped to leave it was hoped that he would leave
c he had put his trousers on his trousers were put on
To summarise, there are five forms in which an English verb can appear: the base
form (uninflected), the past tense form, the third person singular present form, the
perfective (and passive) form and the progressive form.
(64) base past 3.s.present perfective/
passive
progressivesee saw sees seen seeing
say said says said saying
stop stopped stops stopped stopping
strew strewed strews strewn strewing
Any word which inflects in this way will be a verb.
We cannot properly address the issue of the distribution of word categories until
we have introduced the organising principles of English sentences, to which we turn in
the following chapter. However, the issue of the subcategorisation of verbs, which has
a role in determining verb distribution patterns, can be discussed here. Recall from
above that we pointed out that different verbs seem to be able to be followed by
different things:
(65) a the villain laughed
b the hero defeated the villain
(66) a the villain laughed the city
b the hero defeated
To some extent, this is connected to the properties of the verb as a predicate: laugh is a
one-place predicate and its only argument, an agent, tends to precede it, while defeat is
a two-place predicate and takes its agent to the left and the patient to the right. If we
consider a three-place predicate, a pattern begins to emerge:
(67) the mayor gave the hero a reward
In this case, one of the arguments appears to the left and the others are on the right. It
seems that there is always one argument on the left and any other argument must
follow the verb. We call the arguments which follow the verb the verb’s
complements. It appears that there is a special relationship that holds between a verb
and its complements. Consider the following: