yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Linking verbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello grammarians! Today we're talking about verbs and bears. So, we had previously established at least one thing about the verb, and that was that it can show actions. Um, but today I'd like to introduce the idea that the verb can link ideas to one another.

In fact, we have this whole class of verbs that we call linking verbs, or if you want to call it something fancier, we call that state of being verbs. These linking verbs include all forms of the verb "to be," which I handily written out for you:

  • I am
  • He is
  • We are
  • Be
  • Nice
  • They were
  • Being
  • They have been
  • He was
  • We were

Now, we use a linking verb when we want to connect one idea to another. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to divide the screen in half between the action side and the state of being side, just to show you what I mean.

We use action verbs to show what something does, whereas we use state of being verbs to show what something is. So, let's bring it back to this bear. Let's think of an action for this bear to do. What is a bear-like thing to do? The bear eats a fish. That's an action. That's something the bear is doing.

"The bear is hungry," however, is not something that the bear is doing. It's something that the bear is. So, what "is" is doing here is connecting the word "hungry" to the word "bear." It's linking it.

Some verbs can be used both ways; they can be used both as actions and as linking verbs, and I'll show you an example of that. You could say, "The bear looked at me," which is to say the bear is doing a thing—looking at something, namely me.

But we could also say—using the same verb—"The bear looked lonely." Now, in this case, this is describing how the bear looks, what the bear looks like. This "look" is not something the bear is doing; it is how the bear appears to a viewer. So "looked" is connecting "lonely" to "bear." It is linking "lonely" to "bear."

By the same token, we could say for an action, "The bear smells a person." What is it smelling? A person. But we could also say, "The bear smells like cinnamon," which I grant you is pretty unlikely. Don't go smelling bears!

But what "smells" is doing here is connecting the idea of cinnamon to the bear. The bear isn't smelling cinnamon; the bear smells like cinnamon. That's the difference between a linking verb and an action verb.

A linking verb shows what something is; an action verb shows what something does. So, the bear is hungry, the bear looked lonely, the bear smells like cinnamon. These all reflect something about what the bear is, how it's being. You can learn anything.

More Articles

View All
How Scotland Joined Great Britain
Back in the 1690s, there were only two countries on the island of Great Britain: The Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England. England and the other great European powers were doing rather well for themselves by expanding their empires through the c…
Current market conditions in corporate aviation.
[Music] I was going to hit that peak next year. Do you expect the demand to remain? If you got that report just the other day, maybe it was delivered to you by horse, because that information is old and it’s not true. The industry probably hit its peak, …
New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 2: Unlock Potential with “Khanmigo Teacher Tools”
All right. Good morning everyone! Welcome back to our summer learning series for New Hampshire. Today we are going to do a deep dive with Kigo Teacher Tools. And you know what, I just realized I hope I shared my sound, but we’ll see when we play this vide…
Raven Intelligence | Logan the Raven Learns a New Trick | Magic of Disney's Animal Kingdom
In the land of Asia. Welcome to Feathered Friends and Flight. My name is Corey. And I’m Katie. All right, Logan, are you ready? Okay, here we go. You got this? Logan the raven gets ready for his big performance. He comes out, and it’s the opening of the…
Cutting shapes into equal parts | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy
Is each piece equal to one-fourth of the area of the pie? So we have a pie, and it has one, two, three, four pieces. So it does have four pieces. So is one of those pieces equal to one-fourth of the pie? Well, let’s talk about what we mean when we have a…
Sketching exponentials
Now I want to show you a really useful manual skill that you can use when you have voltages that look like exponentials. We’re going to talk about this exponential curve here that’s generated as part of the natural response of this RC circuit. We worked …