Putting it together

So far we've seen main verbs, tense helpers, modal verbs and secondary verbs. Individually, they can pack a lot of meaning into one verb group. Imagine what they could do... together.

Fortunately, we don't have to imagine—we can look at some examples.

For each snippet, we'll first just try and find the verb group (or groups) as a whole, like this:

"She might be feeling bad about it, and want to give the Book back anyway," said Anna.

The River and the Book(2015)

And then we'll try to break them down into the individual components: the main verb, tense helpers, modal verbs and secondary verbs.

Here's the snippet again:

"She might be feeling bad about it, and want to give the Book back anyway," said Anna.

The River and the Book(2015)

You might have noticed that secondary verbs are often (but not always) followed by 'to'. You probably also noticed that we've been highlighting the 'to' as part of the main verb. Why do we highlight it like that, rather than as something separate?

The short answer is, that's just how it is. And it's okay if you just want to leave it at that for now. But if you're interested in some pretty abstract word theory, read on.

Let's imagine we're writing a dictionary and we're adding the definition of is, are, was, am, been, and all the other forms of being verbs you can think of. We could give them all a separate entry, but paper and ink used to be pretty expensive, and when you think about it they all basically mean the same thing—something about 'being'.

Ok, you might think, let's just choose one of them and group them all under that word. But which one? All the options we've looked at have extra information baked in – like whether it's past or present tense, or whether we're speaking about one person or a few people.

The solution to this conundrum is the 'to' form (in this case, 'to be'). The 'to' form of a verb (called the infinitive) is considered the base form. This is because it doesn't have any tense or other kinds of inflection (like when we add -ing or -s or other sounds to a verb to make it grammatical).

So... why do the infinitive base forms of verbs need the 'to' attached? That's just English for you. Other languages often have one-word infinitives, like the French 'to be', which is ětre. So if we were speaking French, we wouldn't even be asking this question in the first place! 🤷🏽‍♂️

Here are some more. First, highlight the verb groups as wholes, then identify the individual components in each group.

Now was the moment when he would have to confess.

The Giver(1993)

Now was the moment when he would have to confess.

The Giver(1993)

It seems weird to think someone can break a bone after they’re dead.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

It seems weird to think someone can break a bone after they’re dead.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

Usually, our multi-word secondary verbs have a 'being' word plus an adjective, but not always. For example, we sometimes use seem plus an adjective when we want to express a state of being, but don't want to say it's 100% true.

We can also use some verbs that have to do with our senses in this way:

It sounds weird to think it.

It feels weird to think it.

Can you think of any other examples?

She was trying to appear to be very frightened, and if you didn't know Sunny it would have seemed genuine.

The Reptile Room(1999)

She was trying to appear to be very frightened, and if you didn't know Sunny it would have seemed genuine.

The Reptile Room(1999)

Pick one of the snippets above and rewrite the verb groups to change the action, tense and modality. Try to use some secondary verbs too.

Verb groups

Putting it together