[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/poutsma-1921-characters-english-verb/)

[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [docs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/) / [papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/) / The Characters of the English Verb (1921); The Infinitive, the Gerund and the Participles of the English Verb (1923)

# The Characters of the English Verb (1921); The Infinitive, the Gerund and the Participles of the English Verb (1923)

**Authors:** Hendrik Poutsma · **Year:** 1921 and 1923 · **Venue:** books (monographs; Groningen: Noordhoff) **Link:** [archive.org/details/charactersofengl00pout](https://archive.org/details/charactersofengl00pout) **License of the paper:** Public domain (author died 1937; published 1921 and 1923) — [dbnl.org/auteurs/auteur.php?id=pout001](https://www.dbnl.org/auteurs/auteur.php?id=pout001)

grammar-book[licence](https://www.dbnl.org/auteurs/auteur.php?id=pout001)

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/charactersofengl00pout)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/charactersofengl00pout/charactersofengl00pout.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. H. Poutsma

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## Summary

Two monographs that expand the verb chapters of Poutsma's larger grammar. The 1921 book contains two essays: one on the "characters" of verbs (Aktionsart) such as momentary, durative, ingressive, continuative and iterative, showing how context shifts a verb's character; the other on the "expanded form" (be + -ing), with its progressive, prospective ("I am leaving tomorrow"), characterising ("you are always grumbling") and other uses, and with a discussion of verbs that resist it (copulas and verbs of perception, feeling and thinking). The 1923 book deals with the non-finite forms: when the infinitive takes "to" and when not (after auxiliaries, need, dare, had better, perception and causative verbs, after but/than), tense and voice of the infinitive, verbal and nominal features of the gerund (his/him coming), and whether participles behave as verbs or adjectives. Each point is illustrated with many literary quotations; the text available is an OCR of scans and somewhat noisy.

## How Mova uses it

- Cited in about 21 seeds in en/seeds/lexicon/ and en/seeds/verbal/, and named in about 13 executable rules of the grammar expert system (en/src/expert.rs).
- Stative verbs and the progressive (§§38–42 of "The Expanded Form") give the rule `stative-progressive` in en/seeds/lexicon/verb-stative-progressive.md.
- The infinitive study gives the bare-infinitive rules: no "to" after active perception/causative verbs, "to" after their passive (`bare-infinitive-active`, `to-infinitive-after-passive` in en/seeds/lexicon/verb-bare-infinitive.md), and the split between gerund-taking and infinitive-taking verbs (verb-gerund-object.md, verb-infinitive-object.md).
- Also used for modal + non-finite, need/dare, semi-modals, "to" before -ing, and participle-or-adjective decisions (en/seeds/verbal/).

## Effectiveness in Mova

A focused source for verb-complement rules; its own contribution is not measured separately. The rule engine as a whole (rules from all sources together) has been measured, not per book: on UD EWT train only 16 of 213 error-level rules fire at all, and almost all of their hits are errors in EWT itself; on a 292-sentence Opus annotation, violations of error-level rules were real errors in 36 of 36 cases, but covered only 6.4% of the erroneous tokens (warn-level rules another 3.9%). In short: precise, low recall, useful as hints rather than full control.

---

👨‍🔬💥

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@book{poutsma1921characters,
  title = {{The Characters of the English Verb (1921); The Infinitive, the Gerund and the Participles of the English Verb (1923)}},
  author = {Poutsma, H.},
  year = {1921},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/charactersofengl00pout}
}
```

- [← previous A Grammar of Late Modern English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/poutsma-1904-grammar-late-modern-english/)
- [next → Scoring Coreference Partitions of Predicted Mentions: A Reference Implementation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/pradhan-2014-scoring-coreference-partitions-predicted-mentions/)
- [↑ back to papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/)