Delahunty and Garvey
Exercise
- Using the progressive aspect test, determine for each of the fol-
lowing verbs whether it is an activity or a state verb: read, examine,
email, own, buy, know, dry, love, be, become. Did you run into any
problems? How did you solve them? - State verbs are particularly common in academic writing. Confirm
this by examining a selection of texts from that genre. Why do you
think state verbs are so common in this genre?
We saw that nouns may shift between subcategories, so it should be no
surprise to find verbs shifting between the state and activity subcategories. For
example, be is a state verb in Oscar is weird but an action verb in Oscar is being
weird, as its occurrence in the progressive shows. The former sentence means
that Oscar is generally or characteristically weird; the latter means that he is
acting weird, though we can expect him to snap out of it eventually.
Exercise
- The distinction between permanent and temporary characteristics is
an important one. Compare Tigers are fierce with Tigers are tired. The
former sentence is grammatical and unremarkable. It represents a gen-
eral characteristic of the class of tigers. The latter sentence is odd in
that it seems to attribute a characteristic we would normally assume to
be temporary as if it were a permanent characteristic of tigers in gen-
eral. The permanent/temporary distinction is exploited in dictionaries.
Look up tiger and four other words in a dictionary and discuss how this
distinction is reflected in how they are defined. - For students who know Spanish. Spanish has two verbs that corre-
spond to English be, ser and estar. What is the rule usually given for
when to use each of these verbs? Check your answer in a Spanish dic-
tionary, grammar, or textbook.
Like all words, individual verbs may have more than one meaning. Con-
sequently, we might expect one meaning of a verb to represent an activ-
ity and another meaning of the verb to represent a state. Smell is such a
verb. The sentence John is smelling the roses is grammatical in the progressive