When this a verb?

Question

When is a verb-ed or ing-verb a verb when they are been followed or precedent by a noun. They are no every time a modifier in these case, but when they are verbs? I am clear when they are followed by an auxiliary verb.

Car stopped in the middle of the road. Is "stopped" a verb or modifier?
People walking in the garden have been tired. Is "walking" verb or modifier?

AndrewN

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  lakshya14 . In the sample sentences you gave, you have to learn to identify the subject and predicate—marked by a  verb —before you can begin to answer with confidence.

1)  The car  stopped  in the middle of the road. 
Analysis: The subject is the car, and this is a legitimate sentence, so where is the verb? It cannot be anything within the prepositional phrase, so it has to be  stopped . This is a basic subject-verb sentence:  The car stopped.  Note that you could write the same sentence in which  stopped  appeared as a  modifier  instead:

1.2)  The car  stopped  in the middle of the road  was  red. 
Analysis: Now, the sentence is specifying which car was red, the one that was stopped in the middle of the road.  Was  is acting as the verb in a sentence that, at a barebones level, reads,  The car was red.

Learn to identify subjects and verbs, and you can navigate such issues with ease. What about that other sentence?

2)  The people walking in the garden were tired. 
Analysis: What is the subject?  The people . Where is the predicate marker, the verb? At the end of the sentence, the word  were . Thus, we can conclude that  walking  is a modifier, one that specifies which people were tired, when the sentence means to convey, at a basic level, nothing more than that  the people were tired .

I hope that makes sense. If you need further clarification, feel free to ask.

- Andrew

lakshya14 · Answer

Thank you.

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  robertessayhub  and  lakshya14 . Not to muddle the picture, but for the sake of completeness, I would add to that last one that an adverb may also "tell us more" about a number of other parts of speech and grammatical constructs: adjectives, other adverbs, a clause, or even a noun phrase. For further reference and sample sentences, see  this Cambridge Dictionary  entry. Note, however, that not all these constructs are ones you need to worry about for GMAT™ purposes. Just practice official questions and see what turns up, and ask for help if you need clarification.

Good luck.

- Andrew

lakshya14 · Answer

AndrewN I understood your explanation very well about the verbs and modifiers. I found an interactive website https://inkforall.com/verb-finder/ , which tells us the verbs and subjects in the sentence. However, when I typed the example which you gave, "the car stopped in the middle of the road was red.", which without any doubt has "car" as the noun, and "was" as the verb along with "stopped" being the verb-ed modifier, but the website above gave us two verbs "stopped" and "was". How is this possible?

bb · Answer

You mean the automatic website did not nail it 100%? 😱😂

Posted from my mobile device

lakshya14 · Answer

Lol yes. https://eg.jfein.net/toBe/ . This one is seems to be working well.

AndrewN · Answer

Precisely. Although the algorithms for many sites seem more fine-tuned than they were a decade ago, the sites still have a way to go before they can match what a trained human eye can spot in seconds. On a related note, I like to see what I can slip by Google Translate from time to time when I come across a casual or slang expression in another language. My most recent search was for the French "tuyau," meaning "a tip" (as in advice). The translation came back with one entry only: "pipe." I got a good head scratch out of it and maybe a chuckle, but that was all.

- Andrew

bb · Answer

Slang and things like these remind me of struggling to translate "Are you nuts?" expression I have read. I gave up. That of course bings up one of my favorite stories and the reply that the encircled American commander of 101 Airborne gave to the offer of surrender... I cannot imagine what Germans thought of it...

"December 22, 1944 To the German Commander, N U T S ! The American Commander" Short Version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_M ... 22NUTS!%22 Long version: https://www.army.mil/article/92856/the_ ... nuts_reply

AndrewN · Answer

Thank you for sharing,   bb  . As an admirer of amusing linguistic anecdotes, I am surprised I had not come across this one before. On a related note, I remember reading years ago about an issue that arose with soldiers (American, I believe) stationed in Germany not receiving care packages from family. The problem? The families, in an effort to avoid paying duties on the packages, were marking them as gifts... the word "gift" in German means "poison."

And on a non-war-related linguistic note, I remember reading in the same article (on the importance of understanding what one word or expression may mean in another language) that decades ago, the automobile manufacturer Chevrolet could not figure out why its new line of cars was not selling well in Latin America when the same line was selling quite well in the U.S. The name of that line of cars was "Nova": in Spanish, "no va" means "won't go."

I have held onto these for years, I guess waiting for the right time to drop them in somewhere. I hope you find them as amusing as I do.

- Andrew

When this a verb?

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