Editing Verb (section)

{{Short description|Part of speech that conveys an action}}
{{About|the part of speech|the physical activity program|VERB (program)|English usage of verbs|English verbs|the radio programme|The Verb{{!}}''The Verb''}}
{{pp-semi|small=yes}}

A '''verb''' ({{ety|la|verbum|word}}) is a [[word]] that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of [[English language|English]], the basic form, with or without the [[Grammatical particle|particle]] ''to'', is the [[infinitive]]. In many [[language]]s, verbs are [[Inflection|inflected]] (modified in form) to encode [[grammatical tense|tense]], [[grammatical aspect|aspect]], [[grammatical mood|mood]], and [[voice (grammar)|voice]]. A verb may also agree with the [[grammatical person|person]], [[grammatical gender|gender]] or [[grammatical number|number]] of some of its [[argument (linguistics)|argument]]s, such as its [[subject (grammar)|subject]], or [[object (grammar)|object]]. In English, three tenses exist: [[Present tense|present]], to indicate that an action is being carried out; [[Past tense|past]], to indicate that an action has been done; and [[Future tense|future]], to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the [[auxiliary verb]] ''will'' or ''shall''.

For example:

* Lucy ''will go'' to school. ''(action, future)''
*[[Barack Obama]] ''became'' the President of the United States in 2009. ''(occurrence, past)''
*[[Mike Trout]] ''is'' a center fielder. ''(state of being, present)''

Every language discovered so far makes some form of [[noun]]-verb distinction,<ref>{{cite book|title=Language Unlimited: The science behind our most creative power |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q7SmDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA78 |author=David Adger |author-link1=David Adger |location=Oxford|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2019|isbn=978-0-19-882809-9|page=78}}</ref> possibly because of the [[Knowledge graph|graph-like]] nature of communicated meaning by humans, i.e. nouns being the "entities" and verbs being the "links" between them.<ref>{{Cite journal |first1=Vivian S. |last1=Silva |first2=André |last2=Freitas |first3=Siegfried |last3=Handschuh |title=Building a Knowledge Graph from Natural Language Definitions for Interpretable Text Entailment Recognition |url=https://aclanthology.org/L18-1542.pdf |journal=ACL Anthology |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231003060136/https://aclanthology.org/L18-1542.pdf |archive-date= Oct 3, 2023 }}</ref>