Verbs combine with other words to form verb phrases (VP), which are the heads of most clauses. A typical clause is a subject and a head VP. English verbs typically have more variety in their forms than other English words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense, person, and number, though these forms can sometimes look and sound the same. Most also have the secondary forms, namely gerund-participle, past participle, and plain form. A special group of verbs with distinctive properties is the auxiliary verbs, including the modal auxiliaries.

Semantically speaking, situations such as actions and states have perfective and imperfective interpretations, which are expressed in clauses and depend largely on the head verb, along with its tense and aspect. English has two past tenses (preterite & perfect), one present tense, and no future tense. The preterite and present are the primary tenses. There are two aspects, progressive and non-progressive. The modal auxiliaries specialize in expressing modality, which relates to how the possible situations described in a clause can reflect reality. There’s also a special irrealis form of be for expressing counterfactuals.

The chapter gives an overview of the possible positions of finite verbs across the Germanic languages. These possibilities are shown to depend on three independent choices related to three different parts of the clause, CP, TP, and VP:

1. (1) If the language is a verb second (V2) language, the finite verb in every main clause moves to C°.

2. (2) If the language has V°-to-T° movement, the finite verb in every clause moves to T° (but if the clause is a V2 clause, then the finite verb will move on from T° to C°).

3. (3) Finally, depending on whether a language is verb-object (VO) or object-verb (OV), the finite verb in every clause will occur either preceding or following all other elements inside VP, e.g., objects, other complements, adverbials (provided the verb has not undergone movement to T° or to C°).