Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

By Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on

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Published February 21, 2019 6:51pm

Some sentences have a lot of words all relating to each other, while other sentences only have a few. The verb is the thing that makes the biggest difference: it’s what makes “I gave you the book” sound fine but “I rained you the book” sound weird. Or on the flip side, “it’s raining” is a perfectly reasonable description of a general raining event, but “it’s giving” doesn’t work so well as some sort of general giving event. How can we look for patterns in the ways that verbs influence the rest of the sentence? In this episode, your hosts...

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