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A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is part of speech that in syntax generally conveys an action (bring, read, ... The active participle of break is breaking, ...
For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, and broke. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, [1] dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. [2] In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed.
In some ambitransitive verbs are ergative verbs for which the alignment of the syntactic arguments to the semantic roles is exchanged. An example of this is the verb break in English. (1) He broke the cup. (2) The cup broke. In (1), the verb is transitive, and the subject is the agent of
An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach → teacher). English also has another morpheme that is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same ...
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects, complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases).
Phrase structure rules break sentences down into their constituent parts. These constituents are often represented as tree structures (dendrograms). The tree for Chomsky's sentence can be rendered as follows: A constituent is any word or combination of words that is dominated by a single node. Thus each individual word is a constituent.
Strong verbs use a Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. They form the past tense by changing their stem vowel. These verbs still exist in modern English; sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and break, broke, broken. In modern English, strong verbs are rare, and they are mostly categorised as irregular verbs.