1195: Defective Verbs pt. 1/4 (Chance) Mar 18, 2018

Verbs are incredibly versatile, but this is not to say that they are beyond limitations. Some verbs, called "defective verbs" cannot be completely conjugated in some way or another. Because English is not a heavily inflected language, these defective verbs are rarer than in other heavily inflected languages such as Greek or Latin. Defective verbs in Latin sometimes are considered defective if there has not been a discovered instance of its usage outside of a few ways, such as the verb 'ait' or 'aiunt' meaning 'he/they speak', which is said to only be used in the third person, but theoretically could have been found in other persons. In English, there are a few verbs like this, such as 'beware', which exists almost exclusively in the imperative (e.g. 'beware of the monster") or as an infinitive (e.g. "you ought to beware of the monster") but almost never as a finite verb, and especially not with conjugational endings, such as "he bewares" or "I bewared". Hypothetically, there is nothing wrong with the syntax or semantics of this, but that is not how the verb is used. Moreover, you may believe that this is because 'beware' has the infinitive 'to be' at the beginning, therefore the defective qualities are sensible, but this defective nature is not true of other verbs that come from 'to be', such as 'behave'. There will be more about defective verbs in English over the next two days.

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