WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

If an action concerns only one person or thing, you mention only the person or thing that carries out the action (the subject) and the action itself (the verb). Verbs which describe such actions are ...

When a sentence uses a transitive verb to describe an action, it’s necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” ...

"Turn off the TV" is an example of a phrasal verb, which is a verb that has a base verb and one or two particles. Credit: MikeSleigh/Getty Images A ‘phrasal verb’ is a verb that has a base verb and ...

Different verbs take different types of complements and assign them to various positions. Two that we will consider here are ergative and unaccusative verbs. The basic one each assign a single ...