What in the World Are You Doing?

Todays Tackle: Verbs - Infinitive, Tenses, Auxiliaries, and Modal Auxiliaries

Who knew verbs could be as complicated as they actually are?

All verbs, no matter what action they describe or what purpose they serve, have a base form also known as the infinitive.  The verb changes to agree with three things:

Person: the subject committing or receiving the action, or the subject about which the action is taking    place

Number: demonstrates the quantity of people or things committing the action

Tense: locates the action in time

If you’ve ever taken a foreign language, I’m certain you’ve spent time in class drilling different conjugations.  Conjugation refers to the change the verb undergoes to reflect these three conditions influencing the verb.  Here’s a refresher:

Present:                        I bake, run, eat

Past:                             I baked, ran, ate

Future:                         I will bake, will run, will eat

Present Perfect:            I have baked, have run, have eaten

Past Perfect:                 I had baked, had run, had eaten

Future Perfect:             I will have baked, will have run, will have eaten

To reflect a tense change, the ending of the word is changed.  Many verbs are regular, such as bake.  Others are irregular, like run and eat.  In the past tense, regular verbs receive an –ed ending.  As you can see, that is the only one reflected in this conjugation chart.  Where is the infamous –ing, you ask?  It is hiding in the progressive form.  (Look!  I just used it there!)  Let’s take a look:

Present Progressive:                   I am baking, am running, am eating

Past Progressive:                        I was baking, was running, was eating

Future Progressive:                    I will be baking, will be running, will be eating

Present Perfect Progressive:       I have been baking, have been running, have been eating

Past Perfect Progressive:            I had been baking, had been running, had been eating

Future Perfect Progressive:        I will have been baking, will have been running, will have been eating

I bet you all think you know what each tense indicates.  Write it down. 

Now compare.

Present:                                    Actions in the present moment

Past:                                         Completed actions occurring at a static moment in the past

Future:                                     Actions occurring after the present moment

Present Perfect:                        Actions culminating in the present moment

Past Perfect:                             Actions culminating in a fixed moment in the past

Future Perfect:                         Actions culminating in a fixed moment in the future

Present Progressive:                       A less awkward way to state actions still occurring in the present           moment

Past Progressive:                            Actions in the past that grant a narrative opening for expansion upon the event*

Future Progressive:                        Continuous actions located in the future

Present Perfect Progressive:           Actions that have already begun in the past but continue in the present  moment

Past Perfect Progressive:                Actions that began and end in the past

Future Perfect Progressive:            Actions that begin and end in the future

I will warn you, the definitions of the progressive forms are ones I have developed in considering the role of each form.  Do take a look at each form yourself and figure out definitions that make the best sense to you.  So long as they are right, of course.  The past progressive is the oddest, hence the *.  That one is a particularly inelegant definition.

Before I move on to explain the auxiliary verbs, I want to draw your attention once again to the verb endings that indicate tense changes. 

Base/Infinitive: used in the present tense, retains base form or adds –s or –es to agree with third person singular subjects.

Past: used in the plain old past tense, adds the –ed

Past Participle: used in the perfect tenses, adds has, had, or will have before the past tense form of the verb

Present Participle: used in the progressive forms, adds the –ing ending

Alright.  Auxiliary verbs.  Any verb associated with the anchor verb that isn’t the anchor verb is an auxiliary verb.  Let me illustrate.

I baked.                                    No auxiliaries, just the base verb bake.

I am baking.                             One auxiliary, “am,” and the present participle baking.

I have been baking.                  Two auxiliaries, “have” and “been” and the present participle

I will have been baking.           Three auxiliaries, “will,” “have,” and “been” and the present participle

Be, Have, and Will are the three most common auxiliary verbs.  But there is another class called modal auxiliaries that replace will to indicate a variety of conditions.  Examples:

Must                        I must have been baking.

Could                      I could have been baking.

Should                     I should have been baking.

These also include Might, May, Can, and occasionally Do.  In each case, they replace the will to illustrate varied meanings.  I’ll leave the classification of those meanings to you for now, I haven’t mastered them just yet and don’t want to lead you astray unwittingly.

Confused yet?  You’re in good company, a whole world of actions have opened up to you.  If I were smart, I would include some exercises.  Maybe next time.

Addendum:  I apologize for any wacky formatting that may have slipped through, indentation is much easier in Word.

Topic One: The Simplest Bits of Sentences

As most people can state, a sentence is composed of a subject and predicate. 

The subject refers to the part of the sentence that serves as the topic or focus of the action or description. 

The predicate refers to the part of the sentence that says something about the subject.

Let’s look at an example.

Snails watch football.

Alright.  The first question we can ask to determine the subject is: Who is doing something in this sentence?  In this case it is the snails.  So, the subject is snails.

Now to determine the predicate, we ask: What are the snails doing?  They are watching football.  In this way, the “something about the subject” that the predicate offers concerns the action in which the snails are taking part.  Here’s a different example.

Snails are delicious.

Again, the Who of the sentence is the snails, but in this sentence we do not have such an obvious action.  (This gets into the difference between transitive an intransitive verbs, but I’ll explain that later.)  Anyhow, the question we must ask ourselves to determine the predicate here is: What am I learning about these snails?  We learn that they are delicious.  The quality of taste is something about the snails that we learn, and therefore constitutes the predicate of the sentence.

Lindblom differentiates between these types of verbs by calling the verbs that refer to the condition or quality of the subject as linking verbs.  In his words, they “lack concrete exactness,” meaning they need further information to make sense. 

Examples of these words include: is, are, was, were, seem, become, or other verbs that connect the subject to the predicate in a necessary relationship.

Now, I want to caution over generalization of the predicate; there are other units in more complicated sentences that provide information that makes the sentence clearer but does not directly say anything about the subject.  The predicate refers to all of these smaller units as a whole, but separately, they have their own names.  Here is an example.

The snails slithered across the kitchen floor when my Aunt Sally dropped the aquarium filled with Tommy’s slimy pets.

The subject is still the snails, but the predicate becomes much more complicated.  Instead of stating a simple action the snails commit, the predicate describes where the action occurred as well as under what context.  All of this information as a whole remains part of the predicate, but individually different grammatical units are coming together to paint a more detailed picture of the event.

Some Basic Parts of Speech

Nouns name people, places, things, qualities, or ideas.

Proper nouns are capitalized and refer to specific people, places, or groups.

Pronouns serve as substitutes for a noun.  Pronouns come in a number of classes: Personal, demonstrative, indefinite, possessive, intensive/reflexive, or reciprocal.

Personal: replace definite people or things (I, you, he, she, it, etc)

Demonstrative: replace things pointed out (this, that, these, those)

Indefinite: replace unknown things (each, neither, either, one, anyone, everything, etc)

Possessive: replace things possessed by someone or something (mine, yours, his, hers, etc)

Intensive/Reflexive: “self” words that add emphasis (yourself, himself, etc)

He hurt himself.  You yourself kicked the potato.

Reciprocal: describes a mutual relationship (one another, each other) Be aware that this is not the same as the indefinite case, though some words are shared.  These two pronouns are both a group of two words, but together treated as one unit.

The tricky thing about pronouns is that occasionally a word that on its own appears to be classified as a pronoun can instead take on a different role and will then be classified as something else.  This is a warning, I’ll get to that another day.

Verbs demonstrate action, existence, or occurrence. 

Blog-Subject Agreement

As of yet, I have not determined any sort of real thread through these posts, but that is all about to change!  Now that I’ve realized that consistently posting is kind of like having a job, I will use my new office as a secluded space where I can sit down and write.  A clean desk, a two-volume dictionary, and a comfortable ergonomic chair, none of which I paid for.  Perfect.  But today, I am still in my apartment. 

My university offers a one-month term during January, granting students the opportunity to take any of a wide variety of courses not generally offered in either the spring or fall semesters.  Many students use this time to take university supported trips abroad or take an intensive quilting or bookmaking class.  While these all sound wonderful, there are only so many years to take a small selection of courses. 

I have chosen grammar. 

By no means am I an expert on the subject; in fact, even after three days on the simpler topics of traditional grammar, I have come to realize that the issues I thought easy are in fact more nuanced than I expected.  Which brings me to my initial point.  For now, at least, I aim to offer a less textbook source of grammar instruction based off my own textbook and my professor’s corrections of said text.

Should you desire to work along with me, I am using the fifteenth edition of English Fundamentals by Donald W. Emery, John M. Kierzek, and Peter Lindblom.  For the sake of anonymity, I will not name my professor, but will mention that his name does appear in the acknowledgments as a contributor for improvements on the text.

That being said, let’s begin.

Stewing

I have only done some preliminary curiosity research, but I can't help but wonder: who exactly is making money off the digital media introduced by e-readers?

My own experience has been limited not only by platform, but perhaps more importantly, duration.  I received a Barnes and Noble Nook for Christmas and while I enjoy fiddling with it on a daily basis, I find I spend more time using the web browser than actually reading books.  Advertisements generate the belief that the over 2 million books available would be over 2 million different books, but I am under the impression that this may not be the case.  There are a multitude of versions of older books available; those for purchase, those offered through googlebooks, as well as other digitized forms.  While this does mean relatively easy access to obscure Irish cookbooks I otherwise would only wonder about or forget after an initial google search, I still cannot find some more modern books.

Amazon has nearly every book for which I have ever searched.  But it comes at a price.  The lure of $0.01 books lasts until the final moment of checkout when the $3.00 shipping charge drags the total price closer to the electronic version available.  On Amazon, the person making the sale earns the money.  Nothing is given to the author for a used book sold cheap.  It is an online market for used books that moves outside the purview of authors and publishers that spent so much time creating something from which they hoped to make money.  I love used bookstores, and equally, used book markets online.  I am a sucker for cheap or free books, with which I have filled my bookshelves at school and am beginning to do electronically with my Nook.

No one earns any money with free books.  It is a beautiful moment when literature escapes the market that sometimes nurtures, often corrupts the initial ideals of hopeful writers.  And yet, I sympathize with the struggle to achieve publication.  I have worked blinding submissions for a small academic journal for the past year.  Often I read terribly uninteresting pieces, but even the unoriginal work reflects months of research and effort to generate a thirty page document worth at least an initial look.  Despite that investment, we only publish 7% of submissions, none of which receive monetary compensation.  And yet, these academic authors know that walking in.

Mainstream authors, on the other hand, have different expectations.  When an author submits a manuscript to a publishing house, the hope is to achieve successful publication, which includes successful marketing that will lead to sales, sales that in turn encourage trust between author and publisher for future submissions.  When I purchase a new hardcover book from Barnes and Noble, the author receives only a tiny portion of the proceeds.  Most of the profit goes to the entity selling the good.  With e-books priced so much lower than the tangible product, my wonder concerns whether or not there is a proportional decrease in profit to the author.  And what about authors whose initial contracts never anticipated this new medium?

Who makes this money, then?  Barnes and Noble, for the sale itself?  Amazon, as the sale occurs through the Kindle technology owned by Amazon?   Some reviews indicate the business model these companies share reflects a desire to offer hardware at a fairly reasonable price so that the consumer will spend more purchasing books for the device.  The subsequent purchased would generate the profit that would justify the technology.

But what about self-published e-books?  There is a growing market seeking to introduce authors who have bypassed the tradition model of publication.  Instead of going through a publishing house, they circumvent the system and offer their work purely electronically, striving to work out contracts for print publication contingent on their electronic success.  If their book makes it to an electronic market, they would presumably receive all the proceeds, but if that is the case, then why do authors continue to use the traditional publication model?

I am only beginning to involve myself in this new corner of the market, but my excitement for free and unusual books comes hand in hand with continued reservations and fears for the potential deterioration of the tangible version.  Will hardcover and paperback go the same way as CDs?  More expensive and tending toward the collectable?

I don't know.
Perhaps I will make an Irish stew and consider the question some more.