Page 40 - DENG103_English - I

Unit 4: Parts of Speech: Verb and Adverb

4.1 Verb Classification Notes

We divide verbs into two broad classifications:

1. Helping Verbs
Imagine that a stranger walks into your room and says:
• I can.

• People must.
• The Earth will.

Do you understand anything? Has this person communicated anything to you? Probably not!
That’s because these verbs are helping verbs and have no meaning on their own. They are
necessary for the grammatical structure of the sentence, but they do not tell us very much
alone. We usually use helping verbs with main verbs. They “help” the main verb. (The sentences
in the above examples are therefore incomplete. They need at least a main verb to complete
them.) There are only about 15 helping verbs.

2. Main Verbs

Now imagine that the same stranger walks into your room and says:
• I teach.
• People eat.

• The Earth rotates.
Do you understand something? Has this person communicated something to you? Probably
yes! Not a lot, but something. That’s because these verbs are main verbs and have meaning on
their own. They tell us something. Of course, there are thousands of main verbs.
In the following table we see example sentences with helping verbs and main verbs. Notice
that all of these sentences have a main verb. Only some of them have a helping verb.

helping verb main verb

John likes coffee.
You lied to me.
They are happy.
The children are playing.
We must go now.
I do not want any.

Helping Verbs

Helping verbs have no meaning on their own. They are necessary for the grammatical structure
of a sentence, but they do not tell us very much alone. We usually use helping verbs with main
verbs. They “help” the main verb (which has the real meaning). There are only about 15
helping verbs in English, and we divide them into two basic groups:

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