English spelling is tricky: that is something most people agree on. There are a couple of pairs of words that a particularly troublesome for a lot of people: practice and practise, and licence and license. Prophecy and prophesy follow the same rules, but as prophesy in particular isn’t commonly used (prophesise seems to have taken
Verbing: when nouns become verbs Our language is changing all the time; this keeps it alive. One of the most controversial areas is the practice of using what used to be a noun as a verb – a practice that, like nominalisation, also has its own name: verbing. As you can see, the very word
Verbs as nouns Some words are like amphibious vehicles that can be both a boat and a truck: the same basic word form is equally at home behaving in very different ways One of the confusing aspects of English is that the same word can act as different parts of speech, or change the function
What is an infinitive? An infinitive verb is the base form of any verb. The infinitive form consists of the word to and then whatever word makes up the verb. In Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be . . . To die, to sleep: To sleep, perchance to dream’, there are six
Do: the neglected third auxiliary verb In special situations, including where we want to give our verb extra strength or emphasis, we use a third auxiliary verb to power our sentences: the verb to do Verbs are often defined as doing, being and having words, as I discussed in an earlier post. While the special
Catenatives (not to be confused with native cats) When the first Europeans came to Australia, they were very confused by what seemed to them to be very odd wildlife. They gave many animals names that referred back to European animals, probably as a way to make sense of the new environment. Koalas, for a while,
Quasimodo and quasimodals: A tale of two misfits Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is now thought to have been modelled on a real person, a stone mason who worked on Notre Dame and carved his image into one of the gargoyles (below) A bit like Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, who spent
Coulda, woulda, shoulda While the ‘being’ and ‘having’ words (the verbs to be and to have) function as the main auxiliaries with verbs, forming different variations of tense and aspect, there is another subgroup of verbs that work with main verbs to show different meanings. These words are also classified as auxiiliary verbs, but differentiated
In the same way that a truck can be just a cab, or have one or more trailers attached to it, verbs can be just one word or several. Before we start investigating the intricacies of tense and aspect, it helps to first be able to recognise a verb. Like nouns, verbs can be one
What is a verb? Nouns are like shipping containers: they are the holders of the meaning we want to convey. Verbs are like trucks: they are words we use to convey meaning (nouns) to other people. In fact, these two parts of speech are the key drivers of language. You could almost do away with