In
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
, a defective verb is a
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
that either lacks a
conjugated form or entails incomplete
conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
* Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
* Complex conjugation, the chang ...
, and thus cannot be conjugated for certain grammatical
tenses,
aspects,
persons
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
,
genders, or
moods that the majority of verbs or a "normal" or regular verb in a particular language can be conjugated for. That is to say, a defective verb lacks forms that most verbs in a particular language have.
English
Common defectives
The most commonly recognized defective verbs in
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
are auxiliary verbs—the class of
preterite-present verb
The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern ...
s—''can/could'', ''may/might'', ''shall/should'', ''must'', ''ought'', and ''will/would'' (''would'' being a later historical development). Though these verbs were not originally defective, in most varieties of English today, they occur only in a
modal auxiliary sense. However, unlike normal auxiliary verbs, they are not regularly conjugated in the infinitive mood. Therefore, these defective auxiliaries do not accept each other as objects. Additionally, they do not regularly appear as participles.
For example, ''can'' lacks an infinitive, future tense, participle, imperative, and
gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiab ...
. The missing parts of speech are instead supplied by using the appropriate forms of ''to be'' plus ''able to''. So, while ''I could write'' and ''I was able to write'' have the same meaning, ''I could'' has two meanings depending on use, which are ''I was able to'' or ''I would be able to''. One cannot say *''I will can'', which is instead expressed as ''I will be able to''. Similarly, ''must'' has no true past tense form, this instead being supplied by ''had'' (the past tense of have), and "to have to" in the infinitive, an example of composite conjugation. The past tense expressing the obligatory aspect of must is expressed as "had to", as in ''He had to go.'' "Must have", on the other hand, expresses probability or likelihood in modern English, e.g., ''"If that's thunder, there must have been lightning."''
Some verbs are becoming more defective as time goes on; for example, although ''might'' is etymologically the past tense (
preterite) of ''may'', it is no longer generally used as such (*''he might not pass'' for "he was forbidden to pass"). Similarly, ''should'' is no longer used as the past of ''shall'', but with a separate meaning indicating possibility or moral obligation. (However, the use of the preterite form ''should'' as a
subjunctive form continues, as in ''If I should go there tomorrow, ...'', which contrasts with the indicative form ''I shall go there tomorrow''.) The defective verb ''ought'' was etymologically the past tense of ''owe'' (''the affection he ought his children''), but it has since split off, leaving ''owe'' as a non-defective verb with its original sense and a regular past tense (''owed'').
Beyond the modal auxiliaries, ''beware'' is a fully-fledged defective verb of English: it is used as an imperative (''beware of the dog'') and an infinitive (''I must beware of the dog''), but very rarely or never as a finite verb, especially with inflectional endings (*''bewared'', *''bewares''). The word ''begone'' is similar: any usage other than as an imperative is highly marked. Another defective verb is the archaic ''quoth'', a past tense which is the only surviving form of the verb ''quethe'', "to say" (related to ''bequeath'').
Impersonal verbs
Impersonal verb
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "''It rains''", ''rain'' is an impersonal verb and the pronoun ''it'' does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third per ...
s such as ''to rain'' and ''to snow'' share some characteristics with the defective verbs in that forms such as ''I rain'' or ''they snow'' are not often found; however, the crucial distinction is that impersonal verbs are "missing" certain forms for semantic reasons—in other words, the forms themselves exist and the verb is capable of being fully conjugated with all its forms (and is therefore not defective) but some forms are unlikely to be found because they appear meaningless or nonsensical.
Nevertheless, native speakers can typically use and understand metaphorical or even literal sentences where the "meaningless" forms exist, such as ''I rained on his parade.''
Contrast the impersonal verb ''rain'' (all the forms of which exist, even if they sometimes look semantically odd) with the defective verb ''can'' (only ''I can'' and ''I could'' are possible). In most cases, a synonym for the defective verb must be used instead (i.e. "to be able to"). (The forms with an asterisk (*) are impossible, at least with respect to the relevant sense of the verb; these phonemes may by coincidence be attested with respect to a
homograph
A homograph (from the el, ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also ...
packaging_in_cans".html" ;"title="Canning.html" ;"title="s with "canning" = "the act of preserving and Canning">packaging in cans"">Canning.html" ;"title="s with "canning" = "the act of preserving and Canning">packaging in cans")
Arabic
In Arabic, defective verbs are called (lit., ''solid verbs''). These verbs do not change tense, nor do they form related nouns. A famous example is the verb wikt:ليس, ليس ''laysa'', which translates as ''it is not'', though it is not the only auxiliary verb that exhibits this property. Some Arabic grammarians argue that
دام "daama" (as an auxiliary verb) is also completely defective; those who dispute this claim still consider it partially defective. Some other partially defective verbs are "
fati'a" and ''
zaala'', which have neither an imperative form nor an infinitive form when used as auxiliary verbs.
Catalan
In
Catalan
Catalan may refer to:
Catalonia
From, or related to Catalonia:
* Catalan language, a Romance language
* Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia
Places
* 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
, defective verbs are usually defective for semantic reasons. Due to their impersonal nature,
haver-hi and
caldre are only used in the third person. The implicit repetition intrinsic to the meaning of
soler
Soler may refer to:
* Soler Township, Roseau County, Minnesota
* Soler (band), Hong Kong based rock band
* Soler (grape), French wine grape, also known as Peloursin
People with the surname Soler
* Alay Soler (born 1979), Cuban baseball player ...
results in it only having forms in the present and imperfect tenses. Verbs pertaining to meteorological phenomena, such as
ploure, can only be conjugated in the third person singular, although a third person plural form is also possible when used with a metaphorical sense. Additionally,
lleure is used only in the third person, while
dar lacks present tense forms, with the exceptions of the first person plural and second person plural. Defective verbs in Catalan can generally also be used in the impersonal forms of the infinitive, gerund, and past participle.
Finnish
At least one Finnish verb lacks the first infinitive (dictionary/lemma) form. In Finnish, "kutian helposti" ("I'm sensitive to tickling") can be said, but for the verb "kutian" (here conjugated in singular first person, present tense) there is no non-conjugated form. Hypothetically, the first infinitive could be "kudita", but this form is not actually used. Additionally, the
negative verb
Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predic ...
(ei, et, en, emme...) has neither an infinitive form nor a 1st person singular imperative form.
French
There are several defective verbs in French.
* ' ("to be necessary"; only the third-person forms with ''il'' exist; the present indicative conjugation, ''il faut'', is very commonly used,
impersonal verb
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "''It rains''", ''rain'' is an impersonal verb and the pronoun ''it'' does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third per ...
)
* ' ("to bray"; only infinitive, present participle, and third-person forms exist)
* ' ("to fry"; lacks non-compound past forms; speakers paraphrase with equivalent forms of ''faire frire'')
* ' ("to conclude"; lacks an imperfect conjugation, as well as first and second person plural present indicative conjugations)
* ' ("to lie horizontally", often used in inscriptions on gravestones; can only be conjugated in the present, imperfect, present imperative, present participle and extremely rarely, the simple future forms)
Impersonal verbs, such as weather verbs, function as they do in English.
German
In contemporary German, the verb ''erkiesen'', which means "to choose/elect" (usually referring to a person chosen for a special task or honour), is only used in the past participle (''erkoren'') and, more rarely, the past tense (''ich erkor'' etc.). All other forms, including the infinitive, have long become obsolete and are now unknown and unintelligible to modern speakers. It remains commonplace in the closely related
Dutch language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-Europea ...
as ''verkiezen'', e.g.
Verkiezingen in Nederland (
Elections in the Netherlands
Elections in the Netherlands are held for five territorial levels of government: the European Union, the state, the twelve Provinces, the 21 water boards and the 344 municipalities (and the three ''public bodies'' in the Caribbean Netherlands). A ...
).
Classical Greek
"No single
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
verb shows all the tenses", and "most verbs have only six of" the nine classes of tense-systems, and "
arcely any verb shows all nine systems".
The verb χρή (''khrē'', 'it is necessary'), only exists in the third-person-singular present and imperfect ἐχρῆν / χρῆν (''ekhrēn / khrēn'', 'it was necessary').
There are also verbs like οἶδα (''oida'', 'I know'), which use the perfect form for the present and the pluperfect (here ᾔδη ''ēidē'', 'I was knowing') for the imperfect.
Additionally, the verb εἰμί (''eimi'', 'I am') only has a present, a future and an imperfect – it lacks an aorist, a perfect, a pluperfect and a future perfect.
Hindustani
In
Hindustani (
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
and
) all the verbs except the verb ''hona'' (to be) lack the following conjugations.
# Indicative Mood
#* Present
#* Imperfect
# Presumptive Mood
# Subjunctive Mood
#* Present
The comparison between the conjugations of ''hona'' (to be) and the conjugations of all other verbs are shown in the table below:
Some verbs in Hindustani which have monosyllabic verb roots ending in the vowels /i/, /ī/ or /e/ are defective because they have the second person intimate and formal future imperative conjugations which are uncommon to native speakers of Hindustani and are almost rarely used. The * mark before some intimate imperative forms below shows those rarely used forms.
Hungarian
Some
Hungarian verbs have either no subjunctive forms or forms which sound uncommon to native speakers, e.g. ''csuklik'' ('hiccup'). See also
a short summary about them in the English-language Wiktionary.
Irish
''Arsa'' ("says") can only be used in past or present tenses. The
copula ''is'' lacks a future tense, an imperative mood, and a verbal noun. It has no distinct conditional tense forms either, but conditional expressions are possible, expressed using past tense forms; for example ''Ba mhaith liom é'', which can mean both "I liked it" and "I would like it". The imperative mood is sometimes suppletively created by using the imperative forms of the substantive verb ''bí''. Future tense forms, however, are impossible and can only be expressed periphrastically.
There is also ''dar'' ("
tappears"), a temporally independent verb that always appears in combination with the preposition ''le''.
Korean
Korean has several defective verbs. 말다 (''malda'', "to stop or desist") may only be used in the imperative form or in the
hortative
In linguistics, hortative modalities (; abbreviated ) are verbal expressions used by the speaker to encourage or discourage an action. Different hortatives can be used to express greater or lesser intensity, or the speaker's attitude, for or a ...
form, after an 'action verb + 지 (''ji'')' construction. Within this scope it can still conjugate for different levels of politeness, such as "하지 마!" (''Haji ma!'', "Stop that!") in contrast with "하지 마십시오" (''Haji masipsiyo'', "Please, don't do that"). Also, 데리다 (''derida'', "to bring/pick up someone") is only used as 데리고 (''derigo'', "bringing X and..."), 데리러 (''derireo'', "in order to pick up"), or 데려 (''deryeo'', infinitive) in some compound forms.
Latin
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
has defective verbs that possess forms only in the
perfect tense; such verbs have no present tense forms whatsoever. These verbs are still present in ''meaning''. For example, the first-person form ''odi'' ("I hate") and infinitive ''odisse'' ("to hate") appear to be the perfect of a hypothetical verb ''*odo/odio'', but in fact have a present-tense meaning. Similarly, the verb ''memini'', ''meminisse'' is conjugated in the perfect, yet has a present meaning:
Instead of the past-tense "I remembered", "you remembered", etc., these forms signify the present-tense "I remember", "you remember", etc. Latin defective verbs also possess regularly formed
pluperfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time i ...
forms with simple past tense meanings and
future perfect
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as ''will have finished'' in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." ...
forms with simple future tense meanings. Compare
deponent verb
In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active in meaning but takes its form from a different voice, most commonly the middle or passive. A deponent verb has no active forms.
Languages with deponent verbs
''This list may not be exha ...
s, which are passive in form but active in meaning.
The verb ''coepī'', ''coepisse'', which means "to have begun" or "began", is another verb that lacks a present tense system. However, it is not present in meaning. The verb ''incipiō'', ''incipere'' ("I begin," "to begin") is used in the present tense instead. This is not a case of
suppletion, however, because the verb ''incipere'' can also be used in the perfect.
The verbs ''inquit'' and ''ait'', both meaning "said", cannot be conjugated through all forms. Both verbs lack numerous inflected forms, with entire tenses and voices missing altogether.
Malayic
Many
Malayic languages, including
Malay and
Indonesian, have many defective verbs. Defective verbs in the related Besemah language (
South Barisan Malay), for example, has been explained by McDonnell (2016). He is not directly using the term "defective verb", but instead "verb root productivity".
Polish
''widać'' ("it is evident") and ''słychać'' ("it is audible") are both highly defective in
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
. The only forms of these verbs that exist are the infinitives. They both work as impersonal verbs in a visible or audible situation that does not require another verb (although may have one), and they have no distinction between singular and plural. For example "Widać blask wśród drzew" (A glow is visible among the trees) or "Jego głos słychać w całym domu" (His voice can be heard in the whole house).
Portuguese
A large number of
Portuguese verbs are defective in
person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
, i.e., they lack the proper form for one of the pronouns in some tense. The verb ''colorir'' ("to color") has no first-person singular in the present, thus requiring a paraphrase, like ''estou colorindo'' ("I am coloring") or the use of another verb of a similar meaning, like ''pintar'' ("to paint").
Russian
Some
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
verbs are defective, in that they lack a first person singular non-past form: for example, ''победить'' ("to win"), ''убедить'' ("to convince"), ''дудеть'' ("to play the pipe"). These are all verbs whose stem ends in a palatalized
alveolar consonant
Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated wit ...
; they are not a
closed class
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...
, but include in their number neologisms and loanwords such as френдить ("to friend", as on a social network). Where such a verb form would be required, speakers typically substitute a synonymous verb ("Я выиграю"), or use a
periphrastic
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one in ...
construction involving
nominalization and an additional verb ("Я одержу победу"). Also the word "смогу (I'll be able to, I'll manage to)" is used: "(Я) смогу победить", "(я) смогу убедить").
Many experiential verbs describe processes that humans cannot generally undergo, such as ''пригореть'' ("to be burnt", regarding food), ''куститься'' ("to grow in clusters"), and ''протекать'' ("to seep")—are ordinarily nonsensical in the first or second person. As these forms rarely appear, they are often described as "defective" in descriptions of
Russian grammar. However, this is a semantic constraint rather than a syntactic one; compare the classic nonsensical-but-grammatical sentence ''
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'', or more directly, the English phrase ''I am raining''. First and second person forms of these verbs do see use in metaphor and poetry.
Spanish
Spanish defective verbs generally use forms with stem endings that begin with -i.
[Butt, John. ''A New Reference Grammar to Modern Spanish''. 5th Edition. p. 175.] The verbs are not commonly used.
* '
* ''se''
* ''se''
* ' (found in forms ending in -i, but mostly replaced by ')
* '
* ''despavorir''
* '
* ' (usually replaced by ''garantizar'', which is regular)
* ' (always used as helping verb, so many forms, although possible, won't make sense)
* ' (to acquire property rights through customary use; only in the infinitive in legal texts)
The following two verbs used to be defective verbs but are now normally conjugated.
* ' (the ''Nueva gramática de la lengua española'' from the Real Academia (section 4.14d) now conjugates it normally, using ''abolo'' / ''aboles'', etc.)
* '
Swedish
The auxiliary verb ''måste'' "must" lacks an infinitive, except in Swedish dialects spoken in Finland. Also, the verb is unique in that the form ''måste'' serves as both a present ("must") and past ("had to") form. The
supine
In grammar, a supine is a form of verbal noun used in some languages. The term is most often used for Latin, where it is one of the four principal parts of a verb. The word refers to a position of lying on one's back (as opposed to ' prone', l ...
''måst'' is rare.
Turkish
While the
Turkish copula
The Turkish copula is one of the more distinct features of Turkish grammar. In Turkish, copulas are called ''ek-eylem'' () or ''ek-fiil'' () (' suffix-verb'). Turkish is a highly agglutinative language and copulas are rendered as suffixes, al ...
is not considered a verb in
modern Turkish
Turkish ( , ), also referred to as Turkish of Turkey (''Türkiye Türkçesi''), is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 to 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant smal ...
, it originated as the defective verb ''*imek'' — which is now written and pronounced as a suffix of the predicate. ''*İmek'' and the suffixes derived from it only exist in few tenses; it is replaced by negative ''değil'' in the tenses originally supplied by ''*imek'', and remaining forms by ''olmak'' (to become) otherwise.
The verb can only conjugate in tenses past ''idi'', inferential perfective ''imiş'', conditional ''ise'', and (non-finite) personal past participle ''idük'' (usable with possessive suffixes, notice the form was irregular).
Ukrainian
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
Verbs ending on -вісти (''розповісти''-to tell, perfective and ''відповісти''-to answer, perfective) lack imperative mood forms; imperfective verbs are used instead (for example, відповідай).
Welsh
Welsh has several defective verbs, a number of which are archaic or literary. Some of the more common ones in everyday use include ("I should/ought"), found only in the imperfect and pluperfect tenses, ("I say"), found only in the present and imperfect, and ''geni'' ("to be born"), which only has a verb-noun and impersonal forms, e.g. ''Ganwyd hi'' (She was born, literally "one bore her").
See also
*
Unpaired word
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being abse ...
– another form of lexical gap
References
Further reading
*
*
*
{{lexical categories, state=collapsed
Verb types
pt:Verbo#Quanto à morfologia