Within the depth-psychology and philological corpus assembled in the Seba library, the term ‘verb’ operates on several distinct but interrelated planes. Benveniste provides the most sustained theoretical treatment, arguing that the verb’s essential function is not reducible to its morphological dress but resides in its capacity to produce finite assertion — the syntactic act that distinguishes it categorically from the noun. This distinction underwrites his celebrated analysis of diathesis (active, middle, passive), where the verb encodes not merely action but the relationship of the subject to the very process it denotes. Snell approaches the verb from the perspective of cognitive-linguistic history, tracking how the ‘pregnant vitality’ of verbal form yields, through Greek intellectual development, to abstract noun and rational concept — a trajectory he reads as constitutive of European scientific thought. Derrida, following Benveniste, interrogates the privilege of the verb ‘to be’ in Western ontology, showing how the copular function invisibly governs metaphysics precisely because it masquerades as absent. Allan’s study of the Greek middle voice extends Benveniste’s diathetic framework into polysemy and subject-affectedness. Jung’s word-association data reveal that reactions to verbs differ measurably by class and education, grounding the grammatical category in associative psychology. Nhat Hanh exploits the ambiguity between verbal and nominal functions to dissolve the grammatical subject as a psychological entity. Across these voices a persistent tension emerges: the verb anchors action, time, and personal relation, yet its formal boundaries remain contested.
il n’est pas nécessaire qu’un idiome dispose d’un verbe morphologiquement différencié pour que cette fonction verbale s’accomplisse, puisque toute langue, quelle que soit sa structure, est capable de produire des assertions finies.
Benveniste argues that verbal function is defined by the capacity for finite assertion, not by morphological form, making the syntactic criterion primary over the morphological one.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
comment se fait-il — la question semblera étrange, mais l’étrangeté est dans les faits — que le verbe d’existence ait, entre tous les verbes, ce privilège d’être présent dans un énoncé où il ne figure pas?
Benveniste identifies the copulative verb ‘to be’ as uniquely privileged among verbs in that it operates even in its surface absence, which forces a fundamental rethinking of the verb–noun distinction.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
Greek not only possesses a verb ‘to be’ (which is by no means a necessity in every language), but it makes very peculiar uses of this verb… It gave it a logical function, that of the copula.
Derrida, citing Benveniste, demonstrates that the Greek verb ‘to be’ received an exceptional logical and ontological extension unavailable in many other languages, with decisive consequences for Western metaphysics.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
when one speaks of the verb ‘to be,’ it is necessary to state specifically if it is a matter of the grammatical notion or the lexical. Without this distinction, the problem is insoluble and cannot even be stated clearly.
Derrida insists on a fundamental distinction between the copular (grammatical) and lexical uses of the verb ‘to be,’ without which the entire debate about ontology and language remains confused.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
the function of the copula governed the interpretation of the meaning of ‘to be’ invisibly, in having always somehow worked it from within.
Derrida argues that the copulative function of the verb ‘to be’ silently shaped the history of Western ontology by operating as an invisible grammatical substrate within philosophical discourse.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Toute forme verbale finie relève nécessairement de l’une ou de l’autre diathèse… C’est dire que temps, mode, personne, nombre ont une expression différente dans l’actif et dans le moyen.
Benveniste establishes diathesis as a fundamental category of the verb, cross-cutting all other grammatical determinations of person, number, tense, and mood.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
les variations modales et temporelles propres au thème affectent la représentation même du procès, indépendamment de la situation du sujet.
Benveniste distinguishes between the verb’s desinential categories (relating subject to process) and its thematic modal-temporal categories (representing the process itself), articulating the double structure of verbal form.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
Le verbe est, avec le pronom, la seule espèce de mots qui soit soumise à la catégorie de la personne.
Benveniste identifies the verb as uniquely co-implicated with the pronoun in the grammatical category of person, linking verbal form to the constitution of the speaking subject.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Nous appellerons illocutifs des verbes dont nous nous proposons d’établir qu’ils sont dérivés de locutions.
Benveniste introduces ‘illocutive verbs’ as a category of verbs derived from speech-acts rather than from things or other verbs, opening the analysis of performativity within verbal grammar.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
je crois (que … ) équivaut à une assertion mitigée. En disant je crois (que …), je convertis en une énonciation subjective le fait asserté impersonnellement.
Benveniste shows that certain first-person verb forms do not describe mental states but transform impersonal assertions into subjective utterances, illustrating the performative dimension of verbal person.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
The pregnant vitality of the verb is given up in favour of conceptual clarity, and thus a trend whose seeds had existed in primitive speech comes to its full conclusion.
Snell traces the historical subordination of the verb’s dynamic vitality to the abstract noun as the decisive intellectual move that produces rational, conceptual thought in Greek culture.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
The abstract nouns which owe their existence to the substantivation of adjectives and verbs manifest this transformation of a statement into the object of a statement.
Snell analyzes how the nominalization of verbs transforms predicative assertions into objects of thought, constituting the grammatical mechanism underlying the emergence of abstract rational concepts.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
The metaphor, then, refers either to a function or to a resemblance — i.e. either to an activity, which is the concern of the verb, or to a property, which is described by an adjective.
Snell identifies the verb as the grammatical carrier of activity and function in metaphor, distinguishing its domain from that of the adjective (property) in the generation of figurative meaning.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
in the Indo-European languages as well, the ‘ontological’ function is not entrusted to a single verb or to a single verbal form.
Derrida extends Benveniste’s analysis to show that even within Indo-European, the ontological function attributed to the verb ‘to be’ is distributed across multiple verbal forms, complicating any simple equation of being with a single verb.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
The word ‘knowing’ here can be either a subject or a verb, as in ‘raining in London’ or ‘raining in Chicago.’ If ‘raining in London’ means there is rain in London, then ‘knowing in the person’ means there is knowledge in the person.
Nhat Hanh exploits the grammatical indeterminacy between nominal and verbal function to argue for a subjectless, process-centered ontology in which knowing is an event rather than a possessed attribute.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting
the lower frequency of verb and adjective will cause rather more difficulty in reaction, quite apart from the fact that, to most subjects, an adjective or a verb in the infinitive, standing outside the context of a sentence, appears more peculiar than a noun.
Jung’s association experiments reveal that verbs, decontextualized from sentence structure, produce greater associative difficulty than nouns, indicating the verb’s dependence on relational context for psychological activation.
, Experimental Researches, 1904supporting
the middle inflection explicates, and thereby emphasizes the subject-affectedness inherent in the lexical meaning. As I will argue below, the pair βούλομαι - ἐθέλω can also be accounted for by means of this scenario.
Allan argues that the middle verbal ending does not merely mark voice but makes explicit a degree of subject-affectedness already latent in lexical meaning, so that active and middle variants encode different salience profiles.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
the middle ending makes this inherent element conceptually more salient, whereas the active ending — being neutral as to subject-affectedness — does not contribute to the meaning of the verb.
Allan concludes that the active ending of a verb is semantically neutral with respect to subject-affectedness, whereas the middle ending raises that feature to conceptual salience, generating the polysemy of voice.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
Les quatre suivantes forment aussi un ensemble: ce sont toutes des catégories verbales… ποιεῖν, ‘faire,’ avec les exemples τέμνει, καίει; πάσχειν, ‘subir,’ avec τέμνεται, καίεται.
Benveniste reads Aristotle’s table of categories as an unwitting transcription of Greek linguistic distinctions between nominal and verbal forms, with active and passive verb categories mapping onto ‘doing’ and ‘suffering.’
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966aside
there exists no verb denoting in her case the fact of marrying which is the counterpart of the expressions mentioned. The only verb which can be cited is the Latin nubere.
Benveniste uses the asymmetric verbal vocabulary of marriage to demonstrate how the absence of a dedicated verb for the woman’s perspective encodes androcentric social structure within Indo-European grammar.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside
A verb, of course, is an action word, a particular noun is the name of an object, and a mass noun is the name of a substance.
James invokes the standard tripartite grammatical distinction between verb, particular noun, and mass noun as an operative framework for experimental studies of early word-learning in children.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside