What is a 'to be' verb?

Am
Are
Be
Been
Being
Can
Could
Did
Do
Does
Had
Has
Have
Is
May
Might
Must
Shall
Should
Was
Were
Will
Would

thanks, seventh grade English class. Anyone want a list of prepositions?

My DIL asked me ‘Could you look over the paper and see if it have any ‘to be verbs.’
I asked what she meant and she said ‘To be verbs=not Jack is afraid but Jack fears’.

Do you know what she’s asking?

She said her teacher doesn’t want to be verbs.

I think she means don’t use passive verbs, the teacher wants action verbs.

To be in present tense is conjugated as:

I am
You are
He/she/it is
We are
They are

I hate it when you talk like that @JLeslie! I don’t know what you mean.

She has to avoid using the words in my list.

So instead of saying Javier Baez was third in the batting order she should say Baez bats third.

The verb is to bat, not to be.

LOL. I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m not sure I understand what the teacher wants, but I’ll explain what I’m thinking further. Mind you, I suck at English. We should have Jeruba or Janbb here.

To be is an infinitive. An irregular verb that is tricky. Let’s look at a different infinitive. How about the word walk. “To walk” is the infinitive.

I walk
You walk
She walks
We walk
They walk

@Seek has it right.

Bats is an action verb in her sentence.

Thanks so much guys.

Google “to be conjugated” and you’ll probably get a better explanation. Try “passive vs action verbs” too and there will likely be examples.

You might find it interesting to do some reading on E-Prime, a variant of English developed by students of linguistic scholar Alfred Korzybski. Among other things, E-Prime entirely eliminates use of the verb “to be” as a way of making language more clear and logical, and avoiding the “God voice” people use to make axiomatic pronouncements. I ran into E-Prime through Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy, since Ellis uses E-Prime for his books.

I AM NOT GOING TO GOOGLE conjugated! I’M NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL!

I’m so excited that Jeruba showed up!

Mods if you move this to Social I will be happy. I’m on my phone and I forgot that I have to choose my forum first on my phone, instead of last like on my desk top.

Passive voice is not the same as any use of the verb “to be.” Passive voice involves a particular use of “to be” verbs in which the subject is not the doer but the done to.

Passive:

I was sent to the principal’s office.
The walls will be painted yellow.
You will be given an opportunity to respond.
The system has been shut down.
She would have been fired if she had been caught.

Not passive:

We are friends.
The house was empty for ten years.
You will be late for school.
Our neighbors were noisy.
I would be willing to go with you.

Passive voice is a legitimate form and use of English and should not be banished by teachers. Instead, they should teach how and when to use it, but they often don’t know. But the real problem is that many teachers don’t know what’s passive and what isn’t. So they mark up all instances of “to be” verbs when most of them are not passive at all.

The technical term for them is “auxiliary” verbs.

@Jeruba Interesting!

Passive: I was sent to the principal’s office. [The subject of the sentence is “I,” and being sent is what’s done to the subject.]
Active: Miss Hegel sent me to the principal’s office. [The subject—Miss Hegel—is doing the sending.]

Passive: The walls are being painted yellow. [The subject is “walls,” and the painting is being done to them.]
Active: The boys are painting the walls yellow. [The subject is “boys,” and they are doing the painting.]

Passive: You will be given an opportunity to respond. [The subject is “you,” and the giving is being done to you.]
Active: The moderator will give you an opportunity to respond. [The subject is “moderator,” and he or she is doing the giving.]

Passive: The system has been shut down. [“System” is the subject, and shutting down is being done to it.]
Active: The system has shut itself down. [The system did the shutting. Also active: The operator shut the system down.]

Passive: She would have been fired if she had been caught.
Active: The boss would have fired her if he had caught her.

Notice that when you go from passive to active you are changing the subject of the sentence. When it doesn’t make sense to change the subject, that’s when you want to keep it passive. Who wouldn’t normally say “I was born”? You make it active—“My mother bore me”—only when there is a need to focus on the matter of giving birth.

Auxiliary verbs have nothing to do with it.

The teacher asked the students to avoid to be verbs for this assignment. So, maybe for this particular assignment it isn’t so much passive or active, but just seeking out the to be verbs. If that’s the case, the list of all the forms of to be is helpful.

Well, that is not a list of “to be” verbs. “To do” is “to be” only if you are discussing existentialism.

As to @Jeruba‘s impeccable examples, if we wanted to make the “non passive” cases even more active, then …

We friended.
The house emptied over ten years ago.
You late, kid.
Our neighbors rioted.
Let’s hook up.

Not say’n they’re right or nothin’, I’m jus’ sayin’ is all.

I didn’t mean @Seeks list is accurate, I did mean getting a list though.

I can name a bunch but better to google. I have present tense above, but Google will have all the tenses.

To do is an infinitive, not a form of to be.

I do
You do
He does
We do
They do

The only reason I understand any of it is because of Spanish class.

Here is a list of to be in the various tenses.

Sorry, my list is the one of so-called “helping verbs” that I had to memorize in seventh grade. Most of them are variant conjugations of “to be”, though not all of them are.

@Jeruba So basically, in passive the subject becomes the object, right?

Active: The noun is verbing the thing.
Passive: The thing is verbed by the noun.

[Mod Says] This question has been moved to Social by request of the asker.

@Sneki95, yes, that’s pretty much it.

In technical writing in particular, you’re apt to see a lot of passive constructions because it isn’t useful to keep saying “The system does this,” “The software does that,” etc. Just say the record is stored, an error message is generated, a packet is dropped, and so on.

Meanwhile, unqualified people who call themselves technical editors go around attacking instances of the verb “to be” in its various forms because they think they’re improving the prose when not only are they making it more cumbersome but they’re not even correctly identifying passive constructions in the first place. A simple declarative sentence using “is” or “was” or “are” is not automatically passive.

Active verbs do make writing much livelier, more vivid, and more interesting. But avoiding all instances of passive voice—even when you know which ones they are—often results in tortuous workarounds that put the emphasis in the wrong place. The point is not to eliminate all passive constructions. The point is to use the most effective and appropriate construction, whether active or passive, in each instance.

@JLeslie, you need a brush-up on infinitives. All verbs except the auxiliaries have infinitives. It’s the “to” form of any verb. It’s where you start when you’re conjugating the verb. To be, to do, to see, to have, to know, to love, to defenestrate, to comprehend, to act, to prefer, to conjugate.

We don’t (can’t) say “to should,” “to can,” “to might,” and the other auxiliaries. We can only combine them with the infinitive form of a verb: for example, to say. I should say, I can say, I could say, I would say, I might say, I may say, I did say, etc.

@Jeruba I know. I was just saying “to do” couldn’t be “to be,” because it is a totally different verb. Do is not a form of be.

become
remain
stay

I did a Web search and found that there are 3 types of verb – active, being and linking. The words I listed are grouped under linking verbs. The only examples I have seen of being verbs are variations of the verb to be. I don’t see the need to separate linking verbs from variations of to be. Is there really a difference between saying, “The food was delicious” and “The food tastes delicious”?

@Jeruba Oh, ok. Thank you for explaining.

Seek’s list is a list of verbs that may be used as auxiliary verbs, not a list of “to be” verbs. Note that be, have, and do (in all their forms) may be auxiliaries, but may also be main verbs.

What Jeruba says about auxiliaries applies to modal auxiliaries, not all auxiliaries (from may on down in Seek’s list, plus can and could). Modal auxiliaries are never main verbs.

@LostInParadise Some grammarians do classify be as a linking verb.

Here is a list of the forms of be:

be
am, are, is
was, were
being
been

That’s all of them (in contemporary English; thou mayest come across art and wast in older texts). See JLeslie’s link if you want to know how the various tenses are constructed.

@Zissou…..I flunked English! All those English terms just confuse the hell out of me.
She’s in class now. Going to ask her teacher to circle the offending verbs. Maybe I can figure out what the problem is then.

@Dutchess_III

The list is what matters for the assignment. Watch out for these 8 words:

be
am, are, is
was, were
being
been

Uhhh… That is, watch out for them when they are used as main verbs, or in avoidable passive constructions. When they are used as auxiliaries for action verbs in active voice, that’s probably not what the teacher wants you to avoid… Dang, I was trying to keep it simple.

Ok, let me try again. When you see one of those words, see if you can reword the sentence with something more vivid or precise that avoids the be word. So don’t say “After the race, John was sore all over”; say instead “After the race, John ached all over.” (But sometimes, a be word is what you want: “Snoopy is a dog.”)

It sounds like the assignment is really about style, not grammar. Some editors tell writers not to use adjectives or adverbs; this teacher may be doing something similar.

@LostInParadise I took a closer look at that site. Don’t use it for grammar advice! It is poorly organized and contains errors. There are better sites out there.

@Zissou that example really helped I think.

@Zissou, modal auxiliaries, yes. Thanks for the clarification.

Get a room you two!

@Zissou So, to take your sentence, ” I took a closer look at that site….” would we change it to “I looked closer at that site.”?

@Dutchess_III – “I looked more closely at that site” would be correct.

K. Thank you.

There’s no be verb in “I took a closer look at that site.” You don’t need to change it.

”...looked more closely” is a bit more formal than ”...took a closer look”, but I’m not sure that’s what the teacher is concerned with in this exercise.

“A closer look” is also perfectly correct. “Closer” is an adjective modifying the noun “look.”

“Looked more closely” is a different construction: here there’s a verb (“looked”) being modified by an adverb (“closely”).

I’d say the first is preferable in the given context on the basis of meaning, but both are correct grammatically. Also, neither one involves the verb “to be” or any linking verb. (As a linking verb, “look” would be used in this way: She looks tired to me.)

I don’t know either @Zissou.