Grammatical and Semantic Functions of Verbs in the English Language

Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck (Department of English), course: Language Awareness III, 3 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The focus of this paper is on the different types and forms of verbs and especially on their semantic and grammatical function. Verbs can convey lexical meaning or solely be used for grammatical constructions without conveying meaning. First of all, their will be given a possible classification of verbs depending on their function either as conveyers of meaning or elements in grammatical constructions. Then, the functions of different verb forms will be looked at. Finally, the verb's role in a sentence and the distinction between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs will be analyzed. In a more practical part the theory will be applied to texts and proved by that. The analysis of the texts is intended to provide a concrete understanding of the abstract theory that is depicted in the chapters at the beginning.