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A finite verb is a form of a verb that has a subject (expressed or implied) and can function as the root of an independent clause;〔Concerning the appearance of a subject as an important criterion for identifying finite verbs, see Radford (1997:507f.).〕 an independent clause can, in turn, stand alone as a complete sentence. In many languages, finite verbs are the locus of grammatical information of gender, person, number, tense, aspect, mood, and/or voice.〔For similar definitions of the finite verb that point to the finite verb as the locus of tense, mood, etc., see for instance Quirk et al. (1979:43f.), Greenbaum and Quirk (1990:25ff.), Downing and Locke (1992:6, 180), Klammer and Schulz (1996:276f.), Radford (1997:508), Finch (2000:92f.) .〕 In elementary level, finite verb is the verb in a sentence which determines the tense. Finite verbs are distinguished from non-finite verbs, such as infinitives, participles, etc., which generally mark these grammatical categories to a lesser degree or not at all, and which appear below the finite verb in the hierarchy of syntactic structure. ==Examples== The finite verbs are in bold in the following sentences, and the non-finite verbs are underlined: ::Verbs appear in almost all sentences. ::This sentence is illustrating finite and non-finite verbs. ::The dog will have to be trained well. ::Tom promised to try to do the work. In many languages (including English), there can be just one finite verb at the root of each clause (unless the finite verbs are coordinated), whereas the number of non-finite verbs can reach up to five or six, or even more, e.g. ::He was believed to have been told to have himself examined. Finite verbs can appear in dependent clauses as well as independent ones: ::John said that he enjoyed reading. ::Something you make yourself seems better than something you buy. Most types of verbs can appear in finite or non-finite form (and sometimes these forms may be identical): for example, the English verb ''go'' has the finite forms ''go'', ''goes'', and ''went'', and the non-finite forms ''go'', ''going'' and ''gone''. The English modal verbs (''can'', ''could'', ''will'', etc.) are defective and lack non-finite forms. It might seem that every grammatically complete sentence or clause must contain a finite verb. However, sentences lacking a finite verb were quite common in the old Indo-European languages, and still occur in many present-day languages. The most important type of these are nominal sentences.〔Concerning nominal sentences in old Indo-European languages, see Fortson (2004:143).〕 Another type are sentence fragments described as phrases or minor sentences. In Latin and some Romance languages, there are a few words that can be used to form sentences without verbs, such as Latin ''ecce'', Portuguese ''eis'', French ''voici'' and ''voilà'', and Italian ''ecco'', all of these translatable as ''here ... is'' or ''here ... are''. Some interjections can play the same role. Even in English, utterances that lack a finite verb are common, e.g. ''Yes.'', ''No.'', ''Bill!'', ''Thanks.'', etc. A finite verb is generally expected to have a subject, as it does in all the examples above, although null-subject languages allow the subject to be omitted. For example, in the Latin sentence ''cogito ergo sum'' ("I think therefore I am") the finite verbs ''cogito'' and ''sum'' appear without an explicit subject – the subject is understood to be the first-person personal pronoun, and this information is marked by the way the verbs are inflected. In English, finite verbs lacking subjects are normal in imperative sentences: ::Come over here! ::Don't look at him! And also occur in some fragmentary utterances: ::() doesn't matter. ::() don't want to (). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Finite verb」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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