Talk:Defective verb

Two Candidates for Defective Verb Status
I have wondered lately about two words that seem to me to be defective verbs, but it is possible that I, being only a linguistics hobbyist, might be mistaken. Would someone please shed some light on these?

The first item is "daresay," as in "I daresay that the answer to the equation is four, not three." "Daresay" seems to function as a verb yet does not occur in 2nd- or 3rd-person conjugations. Furthermore, it does not lend itself practically to tense forms; I have never encountered *"I daresaid..." or *"I will daresay." Additionally, the infinitive "to daresay" seems to exist only in theory. Do these suppositions mean it is defective?

The second item is "methinks," as in Shakespeare's "Methinks I hear hither your husband's drum." Granted, this is an archaic, if not obsolete, term, but it appears to be functioning in some grey area between verb and adverb. The word conveys all the sense of "I think that..." but dispenses with the subject pronoun altogether. Is it a mere idiom? Is it some unique mash-up of an (objective) pronoun and a verb (as it seems not to take a standalone subject)? Needless to say, the word is only used from a 1st-person singular perspective; never does one see *usthinks or *herthinks.

Thank you to anyone willing to share some input! :)

James 68.108.81.171 (talk) 20:46, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think "methinks" is a very good candidate for a defective verb. Rather, it's an idiomatic archaism. English used to have two related "think" verbs, þencan and þyncan, similar to lay/lie, sit/set, raise,rise, drink/drench, taking different arguments. Þyncan had more of a sense of "seem", with the thing being thought being the subject and person the thought seemed to being the indirect object, which at one point was tacked on to the beginning of the verb. Confusing like "lay" and "lie," the two verbs merged, with both the archaic grammar and the inverted arguments on their way out, except that Mr. Shakespeare used "methinks" enough and it's catchy enough that it never quite went away from the speech of people who want to show off their booksmarts. But it's still just the verb "think" with an archaic meaning and archaic grammar that sort of cancel each other out so that it gets mis-parsed to mean what it's supposed to mean.Craig Butz (talk) 02:46, 18 November 2019 (UTC)


 * "Dare say" is two words. It's just an example of "dare" being used as a modal auxiliary, as was mentioned further up the page. "Methinks" is simply an adverb -- just as "hopefully" is an adverb meaning the same as "I hope that..." 2.25.130.141 (talk) 09:49, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

What about stative verbs?
Stative verbs seem to lack the continuous aspect – one would not say "John is weighing 70kg", for example. At least one dictionary, I forget which, even has a notation for this: "(not be + -ing)". But the -ing word is still there and can be used in participial clauses. Still, do stative verbs count as defective? — Smjg (talk) 14:07, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Russian defective verbs
I've found two places where the first-person singular future пригорю was used: once directly, as an analogy and once poetically, from the point of view of the food. I suspect the latter may have been written in response to reading that пригореть couldn't be used in the first person.

Unfortunately, at present this is effectively original research; the one citation I found is poor (just a blog). I can't find a good academic citation that points this out explicitly. —Twice Nothing (talk) 22:49, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Greek
Wouldn't it be proper to point out that in Classical Greek, every verb is "defective" in that there is no verb which is conjugated in all possible forms (both 1st and 2nd aorist, etc.)? 17:51, 18 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not particularly familiar with Greek of any era; but if something's true across the entire language's verb paradigm, I don't think the word "defective" would be at all appropriate. —Twice Nothing (talk) 22:35, 20 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Smyth's Greek Grammar §362 briefly says: "No single Greek verb shows all the tenses mentioned in 359 and 361; and the paradigms are therefore taken from different verbs." This is not saying that the same thing is true across the entire paradigm: verb #1 does not have tense #i; verb #2 has tense #i but not #ii; and so on. It would be nice to be able to say (with citations) a little more about this - the etymological or semantical or whatever determines which tenses are attested for which verb - or, indeed, why it happens that no verb has all of the tenses.  TomS TDotO (talk) 00:27, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Can it!
This article is superfluous for English if we consider that backshifting* is used to express subjunctive, which is why shall becomes should (still today) or will becomes would... The second half of the article should be under 'impersonal verbs' not in this page.

in reported speech (classic / stylistic usage) with indirect questions / requests when expressing conditions, irrealis, counterfacts,
 * Backshifting is found in any one of these cases:

Backshifting serves various functions (or a combination of these): for politeness ("I wondered if I MIGHT ...") for being indirect (eg. when refusing or disagreeing) inflection (suffixing ED / ablauting vowel sounds) for indicating past or unreal contexts for intellectualising (a hypothesis); or   for illustrating irrealis (counterfacts) Stjohn1970 (talk) 13:28, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

French: paître
you can include "paître" (to graze), which does not have the Past tense.

There would be little need to talk about it in the past, but that does not mean that it cannot be (or has not been) used. Why would farmers or herders need to talk in the past about something that grazers "constantly" do, after all? Stjohn1970 (talk) 02:04, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Impersonal verbs
Unless someone offers a good reason otherwise, I plan to delete the entire Impersonal Verbs section, which is wholly uncited, rife with orginal research, filled with logical inconsistencies, and loaded with doublespeak gobbledygook. Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:15, 31 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I approve of the deletion, especially since impersonal verb has its own article and is not what this article is about.—Anita5192 (talk) 13:21, 31 March 2024 (UTC)