1 a All of the units deal with verbs in some form or other. This may be partly due to tradition – verbs have always figured prominently in language courses. But it may also be due to the fact that a wide range of different meanings are ‘packed’ into the verb phrase. These meanings include:

– events versus states

– time: past versus present

– aspect: progressive versus perfect

– voice: passive versus active

– mood: indicative, subjunctive, imperative (factual, non-factual, directive meanings)

– modality: attitude

b a auxiliary verb 7 is; does; has; did

2 a The verb phrases are underlined:

The most difficult part of any language is usually the part that deals with the verb. Learning a language is to a very large degree learning how to operate the verbal forms of that language, and, except in the case of those that are related historically, the patterns and structure of the verb in each language seem to differ very considerably from those in every other language. Most of us, as native speakers of a language, are as a result reasonably convinced that our language has a fairly straightforward way of dealing with the verbs and are rather dismayed and discouraged when faced with something entirely different in a new language.

Note that the adjectives related, convinced, dismayed and discouraged are derived from the past participles of their respective verb forms: relate, convince, dismay and discourage. They are classified as adjectives because they can occur before the nouns they modify: a related case; the dismayed crowd. And they can be intensified by very: very discouraged, not very convinced. Note that neither of these two ‘tests’ work with faced.

b Many languages, such as Portuguese, Arabic and Greek, are more highly inflected than English: that is to say, there are many more verb endings. On the other hand, English makes greater use of auxiliary verbs than some languages, e.g. Turkish or Korean. Some languages, such as Chinese, have no tense marking at all, i.e. no distinct present or past forms. To form questions in English, the subject and auxiliary verb are inverted; in other languages, such as Thai and Japanese, questions are formed by the addition of a question particle. Many languages, such as French or Persian, have subjunctive forms that express hypothetical meanings, whereas English has hardly any.