Verb.<\/p>\n
‘Be’ is a verb because it equates a noun to doing or being another noun or adjective. <\/p>\n
‘To be’ is a central verb in English and is used not just as a lexical verb (on its own – ‘I am human’, where ‘am’ is a conjugation of ‘to be’), but has auxiliary functions as well. <\/p>\n
For example,<\/p>\n
‘You are going’<\/p>\n
‘You’ is a pronoun. ‘Are’ is a conjugation of ‘to be’ and is the auxiliary or helping verb in this situation. ‘Going’ is in the gerund form, because it ends in ‘-ing’, and is the lexical verb in this case, because it actually describes what is happening, while ‘are’ is merely grammatical. <\/p>\n
Some languages don’t have a word specifically for ‘to be’, and some philosophers regard it as a linguistic abomination, because it implies assumptions about existence that aren’t necessarily true. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Verb. ‘Be’ is a verb because it equates a noun to doing or being another noun or adjective. ‘To be’ is a central verb in English and is used not just as a lexical verb (on its own – ‘I Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}