Stative verb

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A stative verb is one which asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property (possibly in relation to its other arguments). Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; they have no duration and no distinguished endpoint. Verbs which are not stative are often called dynamic verbs.

Examples of sentences with stative verbs:

I am tired.

I have two children.

I like the colour blue.

I think they want something to eat.

We believe in one God...

In languages where the copula is a verb, it is a stative verb, as is the case in English be. Some other English stative verbs are believe, know, seem, and have. All these generally denote states rather than actions. However, it should be noted that verbs like have and be, which are usually stative, can be dynamic in certain situations. Think is stative when it means "believe", but not when it means "consider". The following are not stative:

You are being silly.

She is having a baby.

Quiet please, I am trying to think.

Some languages morphologically distinguish stative and dynamic verbs, or transform one into another. Arabic, for example, can use the same verbal root to mean ride (stative) and mount (dynamic).

Propositions that are expressed in most Indo-European languages by noun qualifiers (such as adjectives), are instead expressed by stative verbs in many other languages. In Japanese, so-called i-adjectives are in fact best analyzed as intransitive stative verbs (for example, takai alone means "is high/expensive", and samukunakatta means was not cold).

Formal definitions

In some theories of formal semantics, including David Dowty's, stative verbs have a logical form which is the lambda expression

l(x): [STATE x]

Apart from Dowty, Z. Vendler and C. S. Smith have also written influential work on aspectual classification of verbs.

Dowty's analysis

Dowty gives some tests to decide whether an English verb is stative. They are as follows:

Statives do not occur in the progressive (the * before a sentence means that it is ungrammatical or absurd to most native English speakers):
*John is running. (non-stative)
**John is knowing the answer.
They cannot be complements of "force":
*I forced John to run.
**I forced John to know the answer.
They do not occur as imperatives.
*Run!
**Know the answer!
They cannot appear in the pseudo-cleft construction:
*What John did was run.
**What John did was know the answer.

References

[David Dowty's home page] (Ohio State University, Department of Linguistics)

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