What’s a Strong Verb? grammar neep con’t
Katharine Kerr August 10th, 2006
If we’re going to discuss fine points of grammar and style, then we need to define some terms. Some of the fuzziest common terms are strong verb vs. weak verb.  The difference twixt the two is not so easy to see and does contain a certain subjective element.   Let’s limit our discussion and thus our problems to Fiction.  The terms, strong and weak, are poor choices to begin with. Technically, a strong verb in the Germanic languages, which include English of course, is a verb that inflects by ablaut, that is, by internal vowel change: give/gave, fly/flew, and the like.  Unfortunately, this precise usage has slopped into criticism as a short-hand for “verbs that work in this particular sentence” as opposed to “verbs that don’t.”  How do we define “what works”? Therein lies the problem. Â
There are a couple of ways we can approach this. One is by arbitrary rules. The other takes into account the nature of the English language as well as its flexibility.  Since a fiction writer needs flexibility, I prefer the second approach, myself. Here’s an example: one oft-cited style rule concerns the passive voice. I among others consider that this construction makes verbs less effective, though at times it may be appropriate, simply because it turns direct description of an action into an iindirect one.Â
 The horse drew the cart.  The cart was drawn by the horse.
The second example reads poorly not because of the verb form per se, but because of the misplaced emphasis. The actor is the horse, not the cart.  Therefore the horse should be “marked”, to use a linguistic term, as the subject of the sentence. Does this mean that the passive voice has absolutely no place in fiction? Of course not.  It does mean that most times, the passive voice conveys less information in an indirect, unclear manner than the active voice.
All writing is about conveying information in the clearest way possible. “Bad” grammar, “weak” verbs and the like are static in the signal, interfering with communication.  A “strong” verb, ie, an effective verb, conveys the most information in the most direct manner. (This does not mean “in the shortest possible way,” which seems to be one current interpretation of this general principle.) Effective verbs are also precise. Â
 “He moved forward.” “He trotted forward.”
The second construction conveys more information than the first. It defines the way of he’s moving forward.
Now, what about progressive verbs and perfect verbs that use an auxiliary plus a participle or mainstem verb together to convey meaning? “Perfect” here does not mean beyond reproach, but “finished, completed,” another confusing borrowing from Latin.
Perfect: he has trotted, he did trot
Progressive: he was trotting, he is trotting, he had been trotting
English depends on auxiliary verbs like to have, to be, to do, to define many aspects of verbs: tense, duration, possibility, conditionality. It’s impossible to write precise English without using them. Technically speaking, English has only two stand-alone forms: marked and unmarked, that is walk/walked, give/gave, and the like. The marker is the -ed or the ablaut that marks past action. Calling the forms such as ‘walk’ “present tense” is a misnomer, a borrowing from Latin again. The forms with -ing and -en, as in walking, given, are participles, ie, they are formed from verbs but they fill different functions in the English sentence. They can act as adjectives and nouns as well as form verbal phrases in combination with auxiliaries.
Without auxiliary verbs, it is impossible to use English verbs precisely. That is, if an author was determined to eliminate all auxiliaries from his prose, he could convey simple past and an ambigiously unmarked pure verb form only. Try it and see — absolutely no uses of to be, to have, to do, can, could, would, should, will, shall, and so on allowed.  These verbs are a natual and important part of English, as are the participles. They fulfill functions that no other words can fill.
Let’s go back to an example from our previous discussion of progressive tenses. Â
 He walked down the road when he saw the bird.
This is ambigious, as I said in that discussion. A poster here suggested substituting “spotted the bird” as a way of eliminating ambiguity, but does it?
  He walked down the road when he spotted the bird.
This example still leaves an open question — was the bird a signal to walk down the road? Or did he happen to walking when he spotted it?
 He was walking down the road when he spotted the bird — this construction eliminates the ambiguity.  Or, to go to the other possible meaning, so would ‘He began to walk down the road when he spotted the bird.’
This is what I mean by “precision”. Only the progressive tense, and the use of “to be” with a participle, conveys the exact meaning of the author.  Why anyone would want to throw away such an important tool is beyond me.Â
To sum up, my definition of an effective verb includes conveying precise information about an action by using the natural structures of the English language.  It would also include using vivid words instead of pallid ones and a few other fine points, but all of these depend from the general principle that language should communicate as clearly as possible.
He spotted the bird while walking down the road.
That would be my first instinct, it cuts down the sentence by 10% and puts the emphasis on spotting the bird up first, unless the road is most important to what happens next.
But yeah, there’s nothing wrong with using ‘was,’ it is just a quick way to help spot oddly emphasized sentences, depends on what your sentence is trying to achieve
Tasty, tasty grammar neepery.
And now with unfamiliar info! ‘Cause my Old Norse professor, who appeared to be under the impression he had taught us all kinds of grammar stuff he’d never actually mentioned, failed to tell us why our textbook included a set of “strong conjugations” and a set of “weak conjugations.” We just kind of memorized them. It’s good to know what the technical distinction between them is.
Marie, you studied Old Norse? Wow. I’m envious!
Tobias, but there are some (not me) who would jump on you for using that participle in “while walking”.
I loved this little essay, which makes a principled argument for thinking (as opposed to invoking rules) when evaluating a piece of writing. So naturally I ignore all that and pick one little nit to comment on.
Writing is really about using words to make the maximum impact possible. Clarity is one arrow in the writer’s quiver, but not always the most effective one.
Which do we prefer–”Jabberwocky” or Humpty Dumpty’s clear(ish) exposition of it?
JE
Firstly, just wanted to say thank you for explaining this grammar stuff. I know some of it…but not in as much detail as your explaining, so thank you
A question though…the main principle that you talk about is about conveying information in the clearest way possible. The English language though, has many words which mean exactly the same thing as another - or at least so close to meaning it that it is used commonly as meaning the same thing.
For instance:
Procrastinate/delay Reason/Motive
Although, they don’t in fact mean the same thing (procrastinate generally means delaying something needlessly), they are taken to mean the same thing.
How then, does a writer decide which word to use….on the one hand we have the principle of communicating clearly and effectively (which would seem to imply using well known words rather than the more esoteric words which are in the dictionary but not many have heard of). On the other hand we have the style issue. How does one decide which to use? Or does what James said Re Impace of writing come into it?
How then, does a writer decide which word to use….on the one hand we have the principle of communicating clearly and effectively (which would seem to imply using well known words rather than the more esoteric words which are in the dictionary but not many have heard of).
I think the answer to that would be style in some respects. There’s that lovely saying ‘why use a ten dollar word when a ten cent one will do’ but, like everything else, if your prose is fairly clean and simple, to suddenly throw in procrastinate when delay would do would leap out at a reader.
At the end of the day it is what fits. What is most appropriate to the prose or to the characters it involves. There’s a certain rhythm to prose, and the in same way you can form a paragraph with dadedah sentences that jar, or conversely make me run out breath, then a single word can stop me reading.
Within a story a servant is less likely to say, “Indutibably, the carpet is in need of a thrashing.” It doesn’t ‘fit’ and your mind is probably going ‘eh?’ They are far more likely to say, “Get hold of this ere rug and let’s beat the s*&t out of it.” But that’s dialogue. If your book is written in a literary style, it is more likely you’d use words that send others running to the dictionary. Big words, however, do not make for an ‘intelligent’ book. Words do have wonderful, subtle meanings, and I think, after you’ve been writing a while you will discover instinctively what ‘fits.
Katharine,
For one semester at the end of college, as my thesis was on Viking Age weapons. It’s a fun language, once I accepted the fact that not knowing a bloody thing about the grammar wasn’t preventing me from reading it almost as if it were English. Full of good round vowels and consonants you can sink your teeth into. ^_^
It’s the information that delivers the impact, James. The words deliver the information. “This vampire bat is rabid.” is a plain, simple set of words, but if someone said them to you, the information in them would provide plenty of impact. In the right story context, they would have an effect on the characters, too. One hopes.
IOW, sure.
K1, every word has a connotation and a denotation. The denotation is what we generally call “the meaning”. English has lots of words with similar denotations. Connotation is that elusive scent, like a perfume, that colors and flavors the dull old meaning. There are very few synonym pairs in English that have the same connotations. This is the problem with using the thesaurus if you don’t really understand English well.
I used to live near a laundry that advertised its “sudden service”. I fantasized that I’d be walking down the street when suddenly, packs of clean laundry would fall from the sky, whap! Sudden is not the exact equivalent of fast, in other words; each has a different connotation than the other. If you watch pro football, as I do, you will have heard commentators (an ugly word, should be commentors) making a distinction twixt a player’s quickness and his speed.
How do you learn connotations? By reading a lot, by listening carefully to how people speak, and by learning something about the words that seem similiar. “Procrastinate”, for example, comes from the Latin pro cras, a phrase that means “for tomorrow”. Delay has an impersonal connotation, as in “Your flight has been delayed.” “Put off doing” has a simple, straight forward feel though it means much the same as procrastinate. And so on.
The way a lot of native speakers have used a word for a long time determines its connotations. “Wizardry” had a slightly different connotation before JK Rowling wrote than it does now.
Howzabout:
He walked the road, eyes alert.
There! The bird!
Does this convey the same meaning?
Doesn’t the reader supply some of the implied meaning? When someone reads the first sentence, they must assume he took more than one step, and the action of walking was going on for some amount of time.
A reader goes from sentence to sentence, following the “story now” as Patricia Wrede calls it. Unless it is important to explictily demonstrate the duration of an act do you need use the progressive tense?
I’m not disagreeing with your fine grammar neep, just saying that the story should be more important the perfection of the sentences.
Why, when you can have them both? Perfect sentences and good story? It’s not an either/or situation.
They’re equally important.
A story exists only in its sentences. This is something that we all, soaked in multi-media as we are, tend to forget. With writing, what’s on the page is all you get.
This would work, if the context made it clear that spotting the bird was the man reason our ambiguous ‘he’ was walking down the road. The trouble with grammatical examples is they don’t have a context. They’re simple sentences chosen only to make a point, not to convey excitement or whatever. (BTW, ‘eyes alert’ would have to be changed — despite what you read in a lot of genre prose, eyes do not have a separate existence from the person whose head they dwell in.
But why go to all this paraphasing when English grammar and syntax depend upon verbal participle phrases? Now, interestingly enough, I have never seen anyone advise writers to go through and eliminate other auxiliary verbs, only “to be.” If anyone else has, please speak up here. Do we hear or read “there are too many uses of have and do in this passage?” I never have.
So why should “to be” bear all this onus? From what I’ve seen and heard over many years, its connection with the true passive voice is the cause. Writers who don’t understand what the passive voice is, but have heard it’s somehow “bad”, have jumped on the idea of “compounded with a form of ‘to be’” as a sign of the passive. Which isn’t true.
Another problem with ‘to be’ is second important function in English, as a linking verb. A series of sentences like the following, “He was a soldier. I knew because he was in uniform.”, sounds child-like and thus “weak” to the average native speaker, although certainly some very good writers have used this construction effectively in some situations. Most advice to writers books will tell you to minimize the use of ‘to be’ as a linking verb.
So, again we have people who are confused about grammar who have seized on the obvious — “to be” is BAD! This is nonsense and unnecessary both. What counts is using the best verb to shade your presentation of the information in order to maximize its impact. Verbal participle phrases are an important tool in English. They are perfectly idiomatic, not a disease.
Check out the opening of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, for example, and see if Benjy’s troubled observations are as well-done if you change all the verbs. Check out any page of Faulkner, for that matter. Or Hemingway. No matter what one may think of the sort of stories they tell, or their views on women, race, or whatever, when it comes to prose, they could call their shots, all right.
I just remembered the funniest misunderstanding of what passive voice means that I ever encountered. The person who did this was an Actual Working Editor at a big British publishing house. He/she no longer works there, however.
This person thought that starting a sentence with a prepositional phrase was an instance of passive voice — any prepositional phrase.
From outside came the sound of voices . . .
In the sky ravens wheeled and shrieked . . .
That kind of thing. One may or may not like such constructions, but they have nothing to with the passive voice.
The older and crabbier I get, the more I wonder along with the professor in the Narnai books, “what are they teaching them in those schools?”
The “to be” elimination idea is called E-prime.
Here’s the wiki article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
I’ve commented on the E-prime quote over in “Let’s get progressive”. Good grief!
A further thought on terminology. I suspect that one reason Pat and I misunderstood each other at first is the word “voice”. When we talk about writing, we use voice in two different ways. First, there’s the authorial voice, the overall tone and style of a passage. A passage may have an overall passive tone without ever once using a passive verb if the author’s evasive and vague.
The second is the technical term “voice,” a direct translation of the Latin vox, which refers to one aspect of verbs. Why the Roman grammarians called it “voice,” I do not know, but they did, and the first English grammarians of English just copied it. This is the same mentality that gives us terms like perfect verbs, copulative verbs, and other confusions. “Passive” has changed meaning, too, since it was brought into English. Originally, it meant “having suffered, suffering, putting up with,” and so on. The “Passion of Christ,” for instance, means his suffering on the cross.
Thus, in a passive verb, the object of the verb is “suffering, putting up with” the action of the verb. This was all perfectly clear in 1610.
Now, “voice” in the technical sense answers one simple question: is a verb active, passive, or middle? English has no middle voice, really, though the early grammarians tried to cobble one together out of constructions like “I wash myself” to distinguish it from “I wash the clothes” or “The clothes are washed by me.” Earlier forms of Indo-European languages, such as Classical Greek and Sanskrit, have different verb inflections to mark middle voice, just as they have different inflections to distinguish active and passive verbs.
English has only a very few “inflections”, that is, changes to the way a word’s pronounced (and then spelled) to show a slight change in meaning. We have the -ed or -t to show a simple past tense, and two participles, -ing and -ed or -en, as well as some remnants of ablaut surviving in words that were once Old English strong verbs.
(Some of the ablaut is even disappearing. I have had copy editors change “she wove” to “she weaved” or “he dove” to “he dived”, both of which changes grate on my ancient nerves.)
So, without inflections, how do we show all the various possibilities of verbs? We use participle phrases with helping verbs (auxiliaries, also from Latin) to give our verbs fine shades of meaning. Hence my campaign to rescue “to be” from its philosophically based onus.
Just for those who like this sort of detail, the passive voice in the ancient IE languages developed out of a middle voice, which had a broad range of meanings, not merely reflexive action which is the meaning most often defined in grammar books today.
And example is the class of Latin verbs falsely called “deponent”, which use passive inflexions to express active meanings. These were originally middle voice verbs expressing a certain amount of subject involvement in the outcome of the action or in the action itself. Over the millenia these meanings evolved further but the forms stayed.
The Old IE root sekw- meant to “see, look at”, which evolved into “keep in sight, hunt for.” (CF english “to seek”). By classical Latin times “sequor” had evolved further into “I follow”.
Are there any specific books on grammar or latin that you would recommend?
Vivian, if you want to learn Latin, the standard do-it-yourself text is by F. Wheelock, though it’s been updated and revised many times. I know that amazon.com has the latest edition, I’ve just forgotten the title, being as I haven’t seen a copy in a long time now. If you know some Latin and want to delve into the mysteries of its syntax, Woodcock’s LATIN SYNTAX is the book to get. There’s also a good set of CDs, “Latin Now” from Transparent Language. Yes, I know Latin’s dead, but if you want to read the poetry, you need to have some idea of what it sounded like.
Now, on English grammar, Strunk and White’s THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE is still the standard (despite what some might think) for a first dip into the subject. Get the paperback, not the expensive “illustrated” (with meaningless cartoons) version.
If you really want to get the technical linguistic side of all of this, Silber’s COMPARATIVE GRAMMER OF GREEK AND LATIN is the straight dope, as it were, for putting those languages in an Indo-European context.
Not Silber. Andrew Sihler, and it’s the NEW COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF GREEK AND LATIN. He also has an intro to the subject in LANGUAGE HISTORY.
I shouldn’t post when I’m so tired.
I appreciate your grammar lessons and list of recommendations. Thanks for making it easy for me to know where to start.
Vivian, you are most welcome. If anyone here has more recco’s in the English grammar line, please post them. My knowledge of what’s available isn’t current.
Anyone who really wants to understand language though should try to find an introductory linguistics course at a local school, if they’re not in college, or to take one, if they are. Or find an intro to linguistics book, of course.
Kit