ABSTRACT
Semitic, and Ugro-finnic types, have so many distinctive features that it is quite necessary to recognize them as a separate class of words, even if here and there one or more of those distinguishing traits that are generally given as characteristic of verbs may be found wanting. Such traits are the distinctions of persons (first, second, third), of tense, of mood, and of voice (cf. above, p. 58). AB for their meaning, verbs are what Sweet calls phenomenon words and may be broadly divided into those that denote action (he eats, breathes, kills, speak8, etc.), those that denote some process (he becomes, grows, loses, dies, etc.), and those that denote some state or condition (he sleeps, remains, waits, lives, suffers, etc.), though there are some verbs which it is difficult to include in any one of these classes (he resists, scorns, pleases). It is nearly always easy to see whether a given idea is verbal or no, and if we combine a verb with a pronoun as in the examples given (or with a noun: the man eats, etc.) we discover that the verb imparts to the combination a special character of finish and makes it a (more or less) complete piece of communication-a character which ill wanting if we combine a noun or pronoun with an adjective or adverb. The verb is a life-giving element, which makes it particularly valuable in building up sentences: a sentence nearly always contains a verb, and only exceptionally do we find combinations without a verb which might be called complete sentences. Some grammarians even go so far as to require the presence of a verb in order to call a given piece of commu· nication a sentence. We shall discuss this question in a later chapter.
