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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.
Some English stative verbs are 'know', 'have' and 'be'. Tests given by David Dowty for English statives are:
- Statives do not occur in the progressive (the * before a sentence means that it is ungrammatical 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.
- They cannot appear in the pseudo-cleft construction:
- What John did was run.
- *What John did was know the answer.
In some theories of formal semantics, including Dowty's, stative verbs have a logical form which is the lambda expression
l(x): [STATE x]
Apart from Dowty, Vendler and C.S. Smith have also written influential work on aspectual classification of verbs.
In many non-English languages, propositions expressed by adjectives in English are instead expressed by stative verbs.
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