Verb groups

How are you going? Starting to feel the burn? Hang in there. You got this. Let's do another recap:

• Verb groups don't just communicate what the action is and when it is happening/happened.
• They can also communicate things such as how likely or necessary a process is, how obliged or inclined someone is to do something, how able or successful they are, and so on.
• These meanings are called modes/modality.
• There are a small set of helper verbs called modal verbs whose main job is to communicate modality.
• Modal verbs include words like can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and must.
• Depending on which modal verb you use, you can also communicate degree of likeliood, necessity, obligation and so on (e.g. he had to get there in time vs he could get there in time).
• What's confusing is the fact that you can add all sorts of other verbs to a verb group, and these secondary verbs can also communicate modality.
• The difference is that modal verbs pretty much only communicate modality—they are not much use outside of that—whereas secondary verbs can have all sorts of functions. Secondary verbs are like feature artists: they have their own careers, but they'll drop in and help another verb from time to time.
• Secondary verbs are also useful for communicating phase, meaning exactly where a process is up to: starting, continuing, about to finish, and so on.

Hahaha that's a lot of content!

And we're still not done. Coming up next we're going to talk about a few little wrinkles that you need to keep in mind when you are looking at verb groups:

• Adverbs: these slippery little guys can appear anywhere, including right in the middle of your verb groups, where they like to add their 2c about any action
• Negatives: the word 'not' has its own rules so you can say something didn't happen
• Passive vs active voice: what happens when the person or thing performing the action... vanishes from the sentence completely? Who is left in charge?

After that, we're done!

Since we're going to talk about small details, here's a picture of a small detail called Yuki, who is one of our office dogs. In this photo she's only 8 weeks old and about the size of a grapefruit:

Okay, you ready to bring it home?