Hey! How are you? 😉
Last week we reviewed the personal pronouns and the different perspectives that exist to refer to other people. Also, we checked the basic structure of a sentence. Today we are going to review the most common verb that we can use with the personal pronouns! But furst…
Basic sentence structure
As you know, the basic structure of a sentence is:
Subject + verb + complement
Keep in mind that we will use this structure today.
Verbs are one of the nine parts of speech that we can find in the English language (if not all languages 😀 ) that we can use to build sentences, but, what exactly is a verb?
Well, the definition for the most common type of verbs is: verbs help us describe actions. But that is not all verbs do. There is a special type of verbs that we call Auxiliary Verbs, that help us build sentences that usually convey or emphasize a different meaning to that of the verb.
The easiest auxiliary verb to learn, and probably the easiest to understand is the verb TO BE. I’m sure that at some point in your life, you have heard of the verb TO BE. Well, we usually don’t use this verb like that, in its “infinitive” form (the form of the verb that is NOT conjugated). That is because the verb TO BE has different subcategories to it; but today we will only focus on its Auxiliary form.
The verb TO BE
The verb TO BE, as an auxiliary, can help us place the focus on the subject, giving the sentence a grammatical structure that we can use to convey a meaning. This particular verb can help us answer this questions: what something is? Who someone is? How something/someone is?
We can also use it to ask for someone’s wellbeing, their mood or their personal info 😉
Retaking the basic sructure of a sentence, we can use it like this:
Subject + verb (aux)+ complement
For today’s lesson, we will use the personal pronouns (add link) as the subject of our example sentences.
Using the verb TO BE in positive
When we want to build a sentence using our auxiliary verb TO BE, we need to conjugate it based on the perspective of the subject. Since the verb TO BE is also an irregular verb, we conjugate it as follows:
Here you have some examples of the use of verb TO BE, please note that the “complement” part of our sentences are adjectives, that we will review later:
- I AM chubby.
- You ARE tall.
- He IS strong.
- She IS pretty.
- She IS pretty.
- It IS yellow.
- We ARE happy.
- You ARE funny.
- They ARE thin.
Let’s play a game… Can you match the sentences above with the pictures below? 😉 Leave your answers in the comments!
Using the verb TO BE in negative
What happens when we want to express ourselves in the NEGATIVE? Well, that’s easy:
TO BE + NOT
For example:
“I AM chubby” turns to “I AM NOT chubby”. The auxiliary verb takes the negative:
We can also contract the negative forms as “ISN’T” and “AREN’T” but, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the form “AM NOT” has NO contraction.
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