Action Verbs in English

Verbs are important part of the sentences. They describe the action of a person or subject. For example:

·         She is writing a novel.

·         Mahesh is a clever person. 

In the first sentence, ‘writing’ is an action verb and in the second sentence ‘is’ is an auxiliary verbs because it shows the state of Mahesh that is ‘clever’. 

Look at more examples:

·         Ria is dancing.

·         She is talking to her friend. 

In the above sentences, ‘dancing’ and ‘talking’ are verbs. They are very easily identified. If you want to know the verb in the sentence just ask yourself ‘what is the subject doing?’ Here, the subjects are ‘She’ and ‘Ria’. What is Ria doing? Ria is dancing. So ‘dancing’ is an action verb. What is she doing? She is talking to her friend. Hence, ‘talking’ is an action verb. 

There are two kinds of action verbs:

Transitive Verbs 

Transitive verbs have two features. First it is an action verb which expresses an activity that is doable like swim, paint, write, cook, dance etc. Secondly, it must have a direct object on which the action is performed.

Following are the sentences with transitive verbs:

·         Shyam painted the wall.

Here ‘paint’ is a transitive verb and ‘wall’ is an object on which the action is performed.

·         He kicked the football.

Here ‘kick’ is a transitive verb and ‘football’ is an object on which the action is performed. 

Intransitive Verbs 

Intransitive verbs also have two features. First it is an action verb which expresses an activity that is doable like sit, die, go, lie etc. Secondly, unlike transitive verb they do not have any direct object that receives an action. 

Following are the sentences with intransitive verbs:

·         She eats early in the evening.

Here ‘eat’ is an intransitive verb because there is no direct object receiving the action.