Grammar Question: What do you call a verb that has no number, person, or tense?

[Mrs. Darinski]

This is a multiple choice answer.  Is it past participle, irregular, infinitive, or plural?  I'm stumped.

 

TIA, grammar gurus!  :)

[MASHomeschooler]

Infinitive (in English, the infinitive form is "to __")

[Tanaqui]

This is a multiple choice answer.  Is it past participle, irregular, infinitive, or plural?  I'm stumped.

 

TIA, grammar gurus!  :)

 

Well, the past participle has a tense. It is the past tense. (Sortakinda, and it depends on who's doing the categorizing. At any rate, it generally has a number.)

 

Irregular means that a verb conjugates in a funny way. Instead of having forms, for example, such as: I verb, you verb, he/she/it verbs; I verbed; I am verbing it runs: I am, you are, he/she/it is, I was, I am being.

 

Plural means it has a number. The number is something other than 1.

 

So the only option left is infinitive. In English, the infinitive takes two words: to verb. I want to sleep, I plan to walk, tennis is something fun to do.

[Mrs. Darinski]

Thanks, all!  I appreciate the quick help!  :)

[KeepItGoing]

A couple of minor points: The English infinitive doesn't always have to in front of it. I would leave if I could. I would like to leave. In this case, both leave and to leave are infinitives, one with to and one without. But in both cases, you're discussing the concept of leaving without saying that anyone is actually doing it. That's the purpose of an infinitive.

 

A past participle doesn't have number, does it? Broken, read, decided, understood—they have tense (the action is completed), but not number. If you use the past participle to form the past perfect, then the auxiliary has number (or at least it can). We have broken the glasses. She has read that book.

 

I do love grammar. :-)

Hmm.  Where does this question come from?  Infinitives in English (and other languages) certainly do have tense.  What we informally call the infinitive is really the present infinitive, and English also has the perfect infinitive (to have verbed..) and a handful of other tenses for the infinitive.

[Matryoshka]

A couple of minor points: The English infinitive doesn't always have to in front of it. I would leave if I could. I would like to leave. In this case, both leave and to leave are infinitives, one with to and one without. But in both cases, you're discussing the concept of leaving without saying that anyone is actually doing it. That's the purpose of an infinitive.

 

A past participle doesn't have number, does it? Broken, read, decided, understood—they have tense (the action is completed), but not number. If you use the past participle to form the past perfect, then the auxiliary has number (or at least it can). We have broken the glasses. She has read that book.

 

 

Well, yes and no.  The main verb in the sentence "I would leave' is leave.  The action being talked about is leaving; the modal auxiliary verb 'would' is combined with the bare infinitive to express that there is a conditional aspect to the action.  Unlike Romance languages, Germanic languages like English use verbal phrases with auxiliary ('helping') verbs to express tense and mood rather than conjugating the main verb itself.

 

There are three principal parts of a verb in English which are not conjugated and are not by themselves used as verbs in sentences, but only as part of a verbal phrase.  If they are not combined with a conjugated verb, then they are being used as another part of speech in the sentence.

 

Those three parts are - the infinitive, the past participle, and the present participle. 

 

The future tense in English is the auxiliary/modal 'will' + bare infinitive (without the 'to')

The perfect tenses are a conjugated form of 'to have' + past participle

The progressive tenses are a conjugated form of 'to be' + present participle

The passive voice is a conjugated form of 'to be' + past participle

And then there are lots of modals you can add to the infinitive to express things like conditionality - there's a lot more flexibility in English than in a lot of other languages.  Modals themselves do not have infinitive or participle forms (there's no 'to would' or 'to might')

And then if you get, say, the future progressive or want to add a conditional mood to your perfect tense, you end up with a string of three verbs in your verbal phrase.  (will be leaving, would have left)

 

So in the first example "I would leave", 'would leave' is the verb phrase and the whole thing together is the verb/simple predicate.

In the second example "I would like to leave", the verb phrase 'would like" is the simple predicate, and 'to leave' is the direct object, and acting as a noun in the sentence.

[Matryoshka]

Hmm.  Where does this question come from?  Infinitives in English (and other languages) certainly do have tense.  What we informally call the infinitive is really the present infinitive, and English also has the perfect infinitive (to have verbed..) and a handful of other tenses for the infinitive.

 

Uh, no.  A conjugated verb (one with number, tense, mood) is called 'finite'.  The 'infinitive' is the root part of the verb, and is not conjugated.  There is no such thing as a present or past infinitive - those other two main parts are called participles. 

 

In your example, if there were such a thing as 'to verb', that would be the infinitive.  In the past perfect phrase "have verbed"  contains the past participle, which in regular verbs is formed by adding 'ed' to the infinitive, but it is not itself an infinitive. 

 

The infinitive can be used as part of a verbal phrase that has a tense (although I can't think of one that's in the past - those all use one of the participles...)

 

Uh, no.  A conjugated verb (one with number, tense, mood) is called 'finite'.  The 'infinitive' is the root part of the verb, and is not conjugated.  There is no such thing as a present or past infinitive - those other two main parts are called participles. 

 

In your example, if there were such a thing as 'to verb', that would be the infinitive.  In the past perfect phrase "have verbed"  contains the past participle, which in regular verbs is formed by adding 'ed' to the infinitive, but it is not itself an infinitive. 

 

The infinitive can be used as part of a verbal phrase that has a tense (although I can't think of one that's in the past - those all use one of the participles...)

 

 

I'm afraid this isn't correct.  Most romance languages that I'm familiar with, and their derivatives, such as Latin, Greek, German, Spanish and English have several different tenses of the infinitive.  You are right in that they are not conjugated with respect to person or number, but they are different infinitives for different tenses and sometimes voices.

 

We don't use the perfect infinitive much in English, but if you say

 

"I like to have cleaned", instead of "I like to clean", "to have cleaned" is the perfect infinitive.

 

While the perfect infinitive is made from a participle, it still is an infinitive unto itself.

 

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitive#Marking_for_tense.2C_aspect_and_voice

[Matryoshka]

I'm afraid this isn't correct.  Most romance languages that I'm familiar with, and their derivatives, such as Latin, Greek, German, Spanish and English have several different tenses of the infinitive.  You are right in that they are not conjugated with respect to person or number, but they are different infinitives for different tenses and sometimes voices.

 

We don't use the perfect infinitive much in English, but if you say

 

"I like to have cleaned", instead of "I like to clean", "to have cleaned" is the perfect infinitive.

 

While the perfect infinitive is made from a participle, it still is an infinitive unto itself.

 

Okay, I see what you're getting at - it's when you're using compound verb forms like the perfect and the progressive.  The main verb is not in the infinitive, it's the auxiliary verb.

 

To have cleaned is made up of the infinitive of 'to have' and the past participle of 'to clean' - and the whole verb phrase, like the regular infinitive, is not used as a verb in the sentence (in this case it's a noun and the direct object).

 

I don't think I'd ever seen those forms separately named as a different kind of infinitive.