What is the proper definition of a verb?

Question

I do apologise if the question is wordy, but I feel some context is required for me to stand any chance of finding a satifactory answer.

I have been struggling to understand why the word "is" counts as a verb in English. This lead me to search for what verbs actually are rather than the naive definition I was given in school (doing words). I didn't study English beyond highschool, but I am a first language speaker.
I suspect that most speakers would recognise

The sky is blue .

as a grammatically correct clause, but it always seemed to me that the word "is" was simply defined to be a verb in order to force the rule that all clauses must contain a verb. This is really the crux of the question. I found the following definition:

A verb is a word that in syntax conveys an action, occurence, or state of being.

Even on the surface of it this definition must be wrong because several sources tell me that "to be" is a verb despite it being two words and not a word, but so far the gist of it seems to agree with other searches I've done. From what I can tell, an action is a cause for a change in state and occurences are just actions in the past tense so it makes sense to me that they would be lumped them together in a category.
What I don't understand is why states of being are included, since they seem to me to be inherently passive which I understand to be the exact opposite of being active. I've seen the term "state of being verb" used in some explanations, but this only reinforced the idea that a state of being is a separate category to an action.

Have I misunderstood what an action is? Are the definitions I've found just hideously wrong? Or is there something else (besides an education) I'm just missing?

Answer 1

It's important to draw a distinction between syntax and semantics.

In syntax (how words fit together), words are put into "categories" based on the way they fit together with others. If I give you the sentence "the dog is happy", then:

• You can replace the word "the" with "a" or "my" or "this" or…
• You can replace the word "dog" with "cat" or "bug" or "sandwich" or "plant" or…
• You can replace the word "is" with "was" or "seems" or "looks" or "becomes" or…
• You can replace the word "happy" with "sad" or "purple" or "viscous" or "numinous" or…

As long as you replace a word with another word from the same category, the sentence seems to hold together, even if it doesn't make much sense. But if you swap in a word from another category, it falls apart: *"sandwich this purple looks" isn't valid English.

Based on criteria like this, syntacticians call the words in the first category determiners, and words in the second category nouns, and words in the third category verbs, and words in the fourth category adjectives.

You can also subdivide these categories more finely. For example, some verbs want one noun after them (hits), while others want two (gives), and others want none (rests). "Verbs" is a broad label covering all of these and more.

In semantics (the study of meaning), the word "verb" isn't generally used. Instead, semanticists will use terms like "predicate" to refer to something that can be true about an entity, regardless of what words are used to express it.

Answer 2

Semantically, there are two main functions in language: reference and predication. Some morphological items or words primarily refer to entities in the perceived world, while other items relate the role of each entity in a state of facts. Typically, nouns, pronouns and determiners implement the reference function. The predication function is carried out primarily by means of verbs and, to a lesser extent, through adjectives.

Verbs are the words or morphological items which, in conjunction with some additional elements, express tense-aspect-mood. In some languages (e.g. Lummi, Nahuatl, ...) many items can function as verb in the sense of taking personal marks. In Nahuatl:

(1) in cihuatl 'the woman' / ni-cihuatl 'I am a woman'

(2) ni-mitz-maka-z (1sgSUB-2sgOBJ-give-FUT) 'I will give you'

we can see here that the article in with cihuatl 'woman', but the same item can take the personal mark ni- (1st sing.), the same mark which appear in a typical verb as maka 'give'. This suggest that syntactically a verb is word/item performing an instance of predication function. So maybe it is not correct to assume that the class of verbs and the class of nouns are disjoint classes. What makes cihuatl a verb or a noun is the type of environment in the sentences.

Answer 3

What's a verb? It's different in every language. In English, I can see how you don't want to put is and leaves in the same category. And you're right about why is is considered a verb. But it's not just to make the rule work -- the rule describes the way people talk -- you gotta have an inflected form of be as an auxiliary for

• every predicate adjective (He's short/tired/finished/asleep/gone)
• every predicate noun (That's the president/sand/a hamburger/a clue)
• every passive construction (He was hit by a truck, She was interviewed yesterday)
• every progressive construction (He's flying over, It's roasting now).

The fact is, every clause in English does have a verb in it, although if the only verb is be, it acts like an auxiliary rather than a lexical verb, since it doesn't have any meaning.

And not all verbs are actions. Many are, but many are states. For instance, rent is an active verb, but own is a stative verb. You can tell because the progressive can only occur with actives:

• I'm renting that house now.
• *I'm owning that house now.

You can't define a verb by what it means, because there are too many ways to mean; it has to be by use. In English, verbs can be distinguished by their inflections (past tense -ed, gerund -ing, 3rd person singular present -s) and by their use in a clause.