The goal of this article is exploring the roles of lexical and functional verbs in sentence structure and meaning. Lexical verbs, they are also known as content verbs, usually carry the core meaning of a sentence and are typically action-based or descriptive, such as “walk,” “throw,” or “do.” These type of verbs play a crucial role in conveying the main idea or action in a sentence. In contrast, functional verbs support main verbs, help to expressing tense, aspect, mood, or necessity. For example, they are auxiliary verbs (e.g., “am,” “is,” “are,” “have,” “has”) or modal verbs (e.g., “will,” “must,” “would”). In short, lexical verbs provide the semantic content, while functional verbs support the structure and meaning of the sentence. Understanding and identifying the difference between these verbs is important for comprehending the meaning of sentence.

Verbs, lexical verbs, functional verbs, sentence structure, tenses, core meaning, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs.

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