--- title: Verbs: doing words and being words — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Verbs: doing words and being words», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A verb tells you what happens or what is: in "The dog barked" the verb is barked, and every full English sentence has at least one ver --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Verbs: doing words and being words # Verbs: doing words and being words Lesson 3 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/0/) — A verb tells you what happens or what is: in "The dog barked" the verb is barked, and every full English sentence has at least one verb. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/1/) — Not all verbs are busy: "The sky is blue" has the verb is, a being word; am, is, are, was and were are all forms of the verb be, the most common verb in English. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/2/) — Play charades: "swimming" is guessed in two seconds, but "think" is impossible to act, because it happens inside your head; thinking, knowing and believing are still verbs, just invisible ones. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/3/) — Verbs work in teams: in "I can swim", can is a helping (modal) verb and swim is the main verb; and the verb must match its doer, so it is "he goes" but "they go". - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/4/) — English keeps making new verbs from nouns (to hoover, to google) and gives old verbs new slang meanings, like "she ate that" for "she did it brilliantly"; local verbs live on too, like Geordie "gan" for go. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/5/) — A verb is a doing or being word. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/6/) — A sentence is a group of words with a subject and a verb that makes complete sense; every full sentence has at least one verb. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/7/) — Be is the most common verb in English; its forms include am, is, are, was and were; have and seem are other verbs that show little action. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/8/) — Action verbs show actions you can see, like swim, jump and kick; mental verbs show thinking, knowing or feeling, like think, know and believe. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/9/) — Modal verbs like can, could, will, should and must help the main verb, which carries the main action. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/10/) — The verb must agree with its subject: one doer usually takes "goes" (he goes), more than one takes "go" (they go). - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/11/) — In writing, "Ali and I go to the park" is the standard form of "Me and Ali go to the park". - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/12/) — "Could have" said fast sounds like "could of", but the correct written forms are "could have" or "could've"; the same goes for should have and would have. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/13/) — A contraction squeezes two words into one with an apostrophe, like could've for could have. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/14/) — Brand names can become verbs: in British English "to hoover" means to vacuum, from the Hoover company; "to google" works the same way. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/15/) — In current slang, "ate" or "ate and left no crumbs" means did something brilliantly; the old meaning of eat still exists too. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/16/) — In the North East of England "howay" means come on and "gan" means go; "gan" comes from a very old English verb. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/3-verbs-doing-words-and-being-words/17/) — In the Midlands and North of England "nesh" describes someone who feels the cold easily or is a bit soft. - ← previous: [Nouns: the names of things, people, places and ideas](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/2-nouns-names-of-things-people-places-ideas/) - next →: [Adjectives and adverbs: describing things and actions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/4-adjectives-and-adverbs/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)