Sentence examples for classes of verb from inspiring English sources

There were two classes of verb stems.

I am considering here just the open classes, lexical verbs and lexical nouns; for other classes of verb and noun, see (17) below.

Hirschman and Sager (1982) [56] discuss alternations in the semantic classes of verb arguments, e.g. the alternation between lab tests and body parts as the subject of the verb show in medical texts (X-rays of spine show extreme arthritic change versus The dorsal spine shows moderately severe degenerative changes.., p. 34), but do not focus on syntactic alternations.

A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs.

It has basic word classes of verbs, nouns and pronouns/determiners, adjectives and prepositions.

kòfí náà síé   (Kofi go- )   "Kofi was going"— kòfí wè nà síé   (Kofi go- )   "Kofi will be going"— kòfí síé   (Kofi go- )   "Kofi is going"— Two classes of verbs can be differentiated on the basis of their behaviour in aspectually marked sentences.

(There are also subclasses of the fifty major classes of alternations and of the 49 major classes of verbs).

That work also identified 49 major semantic classes of verbs, grouped according to the alternations in which they do and do not participate.

However, this would not seem to be the case for un- prefixation, where the author is aware of no proposals for discrete semantically based classes of verbs that do and do not appear in the construction.

These analyses also allow for investigation of whether the semantic predictor accounts for variance in both (a) the unacceptability of ungrammatical un- forms and (b) the acceptability of grammatical un- forms, or simply differentiates the two classes of verbs (i.e., those that may not/may undergo prefixation with un-).

For example, a class of verbs called 'factives' (e.g. realize, know) trigger the presupposition that the events or states conveyed by their sentential complements are true.