V. VERB QUALITIES - UW-Parkside: Help for Personal Homepages

10) President Carter was attacked by a rabid rabbit.
11) George had been cheating on Martha.
12) Gwendolyn was sometimes accused of faking it.
13) Albert is being vilified in the media.
14) His mother had been frightened by a duck.
15) They’d been being given bribes by the gang.
16) Kukla is dating Fran.
17) The porridge has been eaten.
18) My aunt was being eaten by a python.
19) The python suffered severe indigestion.
20) Fortunately, I had brought some Maalox with me.
Checklist
In this section, we have talked mainly about declarative sentences. Can you still
distinguish them from imperative, interrogative, and exclamative (exclamatory) sentences?
Can you convert between declarative sentences and their equivalent interrogative forms? Can
you identify the heads, characteristic specifiers, and characteristic complements of a VP, an
NP, an AdjP, an AdvP, a PP, and an IP? Can you diagram them in phrase structure trees?
Can you say whether a noun phrase (or nominal) is functioning in a sentence as
subject, direct object, subject complement, adjunct adverbial, vocative, indirect object, or
object complement? Can you show that you recognize the phrases as structures by identifying
the complete subject of a sentence? Can you recognize subject complements and say
whether they are predicate adjectives, predicate adverbials, or predicate nominatives?
There are four open classes of words–nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Can you
identify them in a sentence and defend your identifications by reference to meaning, sentence
function, and possible inflections? Can you identify the parts of a verb? Can you say whether
the verb of a sentence is transitive, intransiitive, or linking? Among transitive verbs can you
recognize ditransitive (dative) and complex transitive verbs? Can you identify modal auxiliary
and primary auxiliary verbs? Can you recognize progressive and perfect aspect of verbs?
Can you recognize active and passive voice in verbs and convert sentences between
them without losing tense and aspect?
Can you distinguish between common nouns and proper nouns, mass nouns and count
nouns? Can you identify the comparison forms of adjectives and adverbs? Can you tell when
a word is acting as a preposition as opposed to an adverb or subordinating conjunction? Can
you tell whether a participle in a noun phrase is acting as a modifier or a gerund?
Can you recognize articles, demonstratives, personal pronouns, indefinite pronouns,
cardinal and ordinal numbers, quantifiers and multipliers–both as determiners and as standalone
pronouns? Can you recognize intensifying adverbs and distinguish them from adjectives
and adjunct adverbials?
WHEN IN DOUBT, MEMORIZE: When have is a primary auxiliary, it is helping to form the perfect
aspect. When an -ing participle (present participle) is part of a verb, it is helping to form the
progressive aspect. You can't have a perfect aspect without the have or progressive aspect
without the -ing
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