In Chapter 2 we identified a set of words called personal pronouns (see p. 29) which distinguish between first person (I, we), second person (you) and third person (he, she, it, they). (Most of the pronouns also have other forms, me, us, him, etc., but for now we only need to use those in the first column of Figure 11, p. 29.) The class of words that we are now going to investigate is verbs. These are most easily identified by their power of combining with personal pronouns to form a particular kind of construction: run She falls You disappear He disappears They cough It barks We try The words that follow the personal pronoun in these examples are verbs. It will be noticed that they vary in form. When a third person singular pronoun is used the verb takes a suffix ‘-s’, as in disappears, falls and barks. The resulting construction, with the pronoun and the verb combined, has the force of a statement. This construction is called the subject-verb construction. Such an expression as I run has I as subject and run as verb. When such an expression is uttered, the utterance has a truth value; that is to say, the speaker is making a claim. It would make sense to respond with That’s true; Yes, I know; Are you sure? That’s a lie; or How interesting! Thus the subject-verb construction differs in a fundamental way from the expressions we drivers, you boys, he alone, etc., which do not by themselves have any communicative force. If somebody utters we drivers, we need to wait for him to say something else before we can tell whether he is making a statement or not; it would not be sensible to respond by saying It isn’t true.
(Exercise 1 is on p. 49.)