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According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action.The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are static, or unchanging throughout their entire duration, whereas dynamic verbs describe processes that entail change over time. [1]
The construction "am/is/are" + verb + -"ing" indicates present tense combined with progressive aspect if the verb is innately non-stative, as in "I am taking it," or combined with innate stative aspect, as in "I am feeling better." For some stative verbs such as feel, the innate stative nature can be unmarked, so the simple verb form is used (I ...
In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle. For example: The enemy was defeated. Caesar was stabbed. The recipient of a sentence's action is referred to as the patient. In sentences using the active voice, the subject is the performer of the action—referred to as ...
In English, the passive voice expressed with the auxiliary verb "get" rather than "be" ("get-passive") expresses a dynamic rather than a static meaning. But when the auxiliary verb "be" is used, the main verb can have either a dynamic or static meaning as shown below (including copies of some examples from above): The dog gets fed twice a day ...
The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ate is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form was eaten is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, the cat is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences.
Here a form of the verb have (denoting the perfect) is used together with been (the past participle of be, denoting the progressive) and the present participle of the main verb. In the case of the stative verbs, which do not use progressive aspect (see the section above about the progressive), the plain perfect form is normally used in place of ...
In English, stative verbs, such as know, do not use the progressive (*I was knowing French is ungrammatical), while in languages with an imperfective (for instance, French), stative verbs frequently appear in the imperfective. African American Vernacular English does have an imperfective aspect for present tense formed by adding "be" before the ...
A few verbs are of both types at once, like read: compare I read, I read a magazine, and this magazine reads easily. Some languages like Japanese have different forms of certain verbs to show transitivity. For example, there are two forms of the verb "to start": (7) 会議が始まる。 (Kaigi ga hajimaru., "The meeting starts.")