ABSTRACT
Introduction Let’s think a little more about verbs. We have said they are the beating heart of a sentence, and that they are the most important building block of the predicate of any sentence, the part that says what we actually want to say about the subject. Because they are so important, they are also flexible and varied, and we need to look at them from a number of different angles to understand them, like we might a sculpture in a gallery. In this chapter, we look at the common idea that ‘verbs are doing words’, and at how much information is needed to complete a verb. We also look in more detail at the verb ‘to be’.
