home edit page issue tracker

This page still pertains to UD version 1.

VERB: verb

Definition

A verb is a member of the syntactic class of words that typically signal events and actions, can constitute a minimal predicate in a clause, and govern the number and types of other constituents which may occur in the clause.

Note that the VERB tag covers main verbs (content verbs), modal verbs and copulas but it does not cover auxiliary verbs, for which there is the AUX tag. (Russian modal verbs are not considered auxiliary.) See the description of AUX for more information on the borderline between VERB and AUX.

Russian verbs can take the following morphological forms:

A verbal noun can be derived productively from many verbs (e.g. есть  “to eat” → поедание  “eating”). While in other languages the corresponding form may be called gerund and tagged VERB, in Russian it is tagged NOUN. It inflects for ru-feat/Number and ru-feat/Case.

Examples

Border cases

There can be passive participles (tagged as verb forms (VERB)) and participial adjectives (tagged as (ADJ)). For example:

Their meaning is almost identical but the usage slightly varies. Both groups can be used in nominal predication with copula. Only true participles (verbs) can be used to form the passive construction and take obliques that refer to semantic agents (actor), place and other circumstances of the situation (e. g. танк не был бронирован на заводе, бронированный на заводе танк  “the tank (was) armored at the factory”). On the other hand, the participial adjectives modify nouns and are used in attributive, depictive (and sometimes predicative) constructions.


VERB in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [eu] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [yue] [zh]