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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]
In linguistic typology, active–stative alignment (also split intransitive alignment or semantic alignment) is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the sole argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause (often symbolized as S) is sometimes marked in the same way as an agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject such as "I" or "she" in English) but other times in the same way ...
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 ...
gizona -∅ the.man - ABS S etorri da has arrived VERB intrans gizona -∅ {etorri da} the.man -ABS {has arrived} S VERB intrans 'The man has arrived.' Gizonak mutila ikusi du. gizona -k the.man - ERG A mutila -∅ boy - ABS O ikusi du saw VERB trans gizona -k mutila -∅ {ikusi du} the.man -ERG boy -ABS saw A O VERB trans 'The man saw the boy.' In Basque, gizona is "the man" and mutila is ...
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 ...
Another example is a former safe sex campaign slogan in Flanders: Eerst bla-bla, dan boem-boem (First talk, then have sex; lit. First blah-blah, then boom-boom). In Dutch the verb "gaan" (to go) can be used as an auxiliary verb, which can lead to a triplication: we gaan (eens) gaan gaan (we are going to get going).
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.