If you've been studying verb tenses in English, then you may have come across
this distinction between dynamic verbs and state or stative verbs. The
distinction is important because it has some bearing on what we call the
continuous aspect -- so the continuous aspect of the verb. To illustrate
what I mean by that I have a couple of examples here. In each case we have
used a continuous kind of verb, and the continuous verb always contains at least
a present participle (present participles end in -ing so you can kind of tell that
these are present participles) and then some helping verbs as well. There are
lots of different continuous tenses, so I'm not going to give examples of all of
them, but all you need to be able to spot here is that these tenses
contain the present participle and some helping verbs. Now this is incorrect
If you say "I am needing a haircut" or "it is containing peanuts." And it's incorrect
because these verbs are stative verbs and we don't use the stative verb in the
continuous tense. That's the basic thing to take away from this video. If that's
all you remember from this, that's fantastic. So don't use a stative verb
in a continuous tense. The trouble is how do we tell the difference
between a dynamic verb versus a stative verb. How can you tell the difference?
Well, let's go through this and just look for a few clues that would
indicate what we're dealing with here. Alright,
so I've given you four examples for each kind of verb, and we'll start here with
the dynamic verbs. One thing you'll notice with dynamic verbs is that they
often have a kind of physical aspect to them. You can often see them going on and
they are ... very much an action as opposed to a state of being. So
this is more of a state of being as opposed to an action. As I said, you can
also use dynamic verbs in the continuous form. So if you say "I am kicking," "I am
eating," "I am laughing," "I am coming" -- all of these make sense,
but it's more difficult to do that with these stative verbs. If you were to
say, for instance, "one plus one equals two," you would not say "one plus one is
equaling two." Or if you say, "I know you," you would not say "I am knowing you."
Or [with] "it belongs to me," you would not say "it is belonging to me." And so on ... So you can
really see the difference then between the two. Now some other things that
you're going to want to look for is that with dynamic verbs there's often a sense
of progress or change ... or repetition, or more broadly speaking
there is some kind of capability of allowing these
things to happen -- so capability that leads to these. Let me give you an
example here. Let's say that you're talking about kicking. I might just kick
once, but I can also kick a number of times. ... If I'm playing
soccer I might kick the ball a whole bunch of times in a row. And as soon as
you get that sense of a continuing action -- something that happens more than
once, or happens over a period of time -- then we're talking about dynamic verbs
that can be continuous. They they're not just a kind of one-time
event but they are continuing event. Or at least they have the capability of
continuing over a period of time. So that's really what separates the
two. With state or stative verbs we do have a sense of
something being static. We have a sense of something not changing. So less
changing. If I know you now I might know you later. If one plus one
equals two now, it's going to equal that later. It's not that same sense of
a process or some kind of change. And then if we want to be even more specific
we can also talk about particular categories that we tend to come across
quite often with stative verbs. I'll just mention a few here. So some of
these have to do with perception and knowledge, or knowing. So "know" here is an
example, but you could use something like "recognize" or "understand." These are all
states of being. Another one would be something like emotions, and I've given
the example of "hate" here, but you could also add something like "love." You don't
say "I am hating" or "I am loving" so much. You tend to say "I hate." So these
are emotions that don't necessarily change over time but they
describe a state of being. One more category here, just to flesh this out a
little bit. This would be a category such as possession. And that's why you don't
say "it is belonging to me," but you say "it belongs to me." It's a state of being. It's
static and it's more unchanging. Hopefully that makes some sense of the
distinction, but I would like to end with a little bit of an exception, because
it's possible that you might come across a stative verb or a verb that
seems stative but is being used in a more dynamic way -- it's actually being used as
or in the continuous aspect. Let me give you an example of this. We've
mentioned "hate" and "love" before, and you could actually say not only "I love this,"
but if you're being more casual you could use the continuous form. You could
say, "I am loving this," and what you mean by that is that this is more of a
process. It's not just one moment in time, but "I am loving this" -- it's
it's almost like something that has a duration to it. It's something going on
over a period of time, and so sometimes you see that these verbs that are more
or less stative are being used in the continuous form. One last example and
this one shows that sometimes when a verb like this is used in that kind of
continuous aspect it actually comes with a different expression. It
kind of has a different phrasing to it. So let's say you say something like "I
lack courage" ... so "lack" is a stative verb
because it describes a state of being, but you could say "I am lacking in
courage." Kind of a weird expression but then we add this
preposition "in" to kind of allow it to become continuous. That's another
example of where we see some overlap between the two,
or we see verbs that are sometimes stative and sometimes dynamic and can
participate in the continuous aspect. Hopefully that makes some sense of the
distinction, but again, the basic takeaway is that you just need to make sure that
you don't use stative verbs in the continuous aspect unless it's an
exceptional case.