Re: Verb Structure

 Incidentally, there are natural languages which have only a small
number of verbs that can take finite marking. Basque is a good example,
having perhaps 12 commonly used verbs with finite forms, some of which
are then used as auxilliaries for the rest. IIRC there was an australian
language that had only three verbs with finite forms.
 But then we get into the question of what is a verb. Basque, for
example, although it has only 12 verbs with finite forms, has a set of
stems which you could (and people working on Basque do) also call
(non-finite) verbs because they have forms not shared by adjectives or
nouns. Eg:

egin "to make"
galdu "to lose"

least marked form, often used where English or other IE languages would
use an infinitive. Eg: egin nahi dut "I want *to make* it", galdu nahi
dut "I want *to lose* him". Can also be used as an adjective with
passive and perfective connotations:

ardi galdu bat
sheep lost one
"a lost sheep"

But from these verbs you can also form a verbal noun:

egite - making
galtze - losing

and also a progressive form used with the auxilliaries:

egiten dut
making 3rd.abs-have-1st.erg
I am making it

and so on. But these forms cannot be derived for adjectives:

gorri "red"
*gortzen "redding"

To get a form meaning "become red" you need to derive a verb from the
adjective "gorri" via addition of a verb marking ending. The productive
ending in Basque now is -tu (related to Spanish -ado, -ido etc I think
via borrowings):

gorri-tu
red-perf

and thus:

gorritze "redding"

 The different forms of verbs also have distinct distributional
properties compared to both nouns and adjectives.
 So in Basque, it seems clear that as well as the set of 12 "true"
verbs, there is also a distinct class that could also be called verbs. I
suspect this may be true in most other languages with a limited number
of verbs with finite forms, although what separates the class of
non-finite verbs from members of other classes may differ obviously
between languages.

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