verb

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verb Linguistic category (part of speech) found in all languages, consisting of words typically denoting an action, an event or a state (for example, in English, to run, to snow, to depend). Typical verbs are associated with one or more ‘arguments’, such as subject and direct object. In English, verbs may be intransitive or transitive; intransitives have one argument (she sneezed), and transitives two or (rarely) more (she played snooker, she taught him Russian). Verbs may carry grammatical information, including: person (as grammatical agreement with the subject); tense (relating to when the verb took place); aspect (whether what is meant is complete or incomplete at some reference time); number (whether any of the arguments are singular or plural); and voice (which argument serves as subject). In other languages, verbs may encode different information. A list of all forms of a verb is called its paradigm, and this may be regular (predictable by a rule) or irregular. The most irregular verbs in a language are often those in most frequent use and with the most general meaning.

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