Verbs in the Linking Syntactical Function in Modern English

Abstract

The problem of the verbs in the linking syntactical function remains topical as in the English language the range of these verbs is substantially wider than it is in the other Germanic languages. Therefore the predicates formed by means of these verbs are frequently used and they occupy a prominent position in the syntactic system of the English language. However, the role of verbal elements of such predicates is still debatable and no firm conclusion has been reached yet. Taking into account various approaches to the study of the verbs in the linking syntactical function, linguists have quite different opinions as to the quality of these verbs. Thus, some linguists regard them as a mode of connecting the principal positions of sentence and deny their primary meaning, while the others acknowledge their semantic value.