Semantic Classification Of Verbs And Subjects

Semantic classification of verbs and subjects

Beatriz Millán Risco

Verbs, as it has been said in so many different books and worded in so many different ways, are the most important part of a sentence, being sometimes referred to as being the heart of the sentence or the engine of the language. Having, in fact, far more descriptive power than adverbs or adjectives, the verb only is able toexpress an action or event described by the sentence and to provide information about people or objects involved. According to Bolan’s statement in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol 22, Nº 2, 1993, “Verbs provide the clearest example of the potential interface between lexical access and sentence processing. More than any other word in a sentence, the matrix verb defines the situationthat sentence describes, including the number and types of participants.”

I have therefore decided to focus this essay on a basic analysis of the verbs contained in an extract from Clarissa Pinkola’s book “Women who run with the wolves”. I will be analyzing this extract from two different grammatical points of view: on the one hand I will be classifying verbs according to their semanticcategory. On the other hand I am going to classify and analyze subjects trying to explain how, in my opinion, subjects and verbs transform the reading into quite a subjective experience.



The book “Women who run with the wolves” is an extremely interesting piece of writing on the profound instinctive nature of women which has deeply suffered throughout history, being misunderstood and “erroneouslyreputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous”[1]. The author draws a revealing parallel between the wild psyche in women and wildlife, explaining why both have become endangered species, and brings back to life through the exhaustive analysis of many popular story tales the trails to follow in order to come back home to the Wild Woman. The chosen extract belongs to thelast chapter; the Wild Woman has returned, she does not only eat, rest, rove in between, render loyalty, love the children, cavil in moonlight, tune her ears, attend to the bones and make love but very often howls to awake the dormant ones.

By having a look at the lexical verbs in this text, we can appreciate there is quite an extensive use of activity verbs, as we can find 23 different onesversus 12 mental verbs, 5 existence verbs, 1 verb of aspect and 2 communication verbs. Within the auxiliary verbs category, we find the copula be, 1 result copular verb, have and four modal verbs. We also find the two primary verbs have and be acting as main verbs.

|Lexical verbs |Auxiliary verbs |Primary verbs as main verbs ||Activity verbs: |Copula be |Be |
|1.Verbs of motion: |Result copular verb: become |Have |
|a/inherently directed motion: move, come, |Auxiliary have | ||join, pass, surround; | | |
|b/manner of motion: dive, jump, turn, | | |
|overturn, backtrack (verbs with | | ||derivational affix) pop up (phrasal verb); | | |
|c/chase verbs: shadow, pursue; fall back | | |
|(free combination) | | |...