Are there sentences without verbs

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Q: What is a sentence without a verb called? Write your answer Related questions. What do you call the essential verb or verb phrase that cannot be left out of a sentence? Can you have a sentence without a verb?

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Viewed 5k times. Improve this question. It's an idiom. This one is an extragrammatical idiom; most would probably call it a 'sentence fragment'. It's probably not overly formal, but is fine in most registers. Sentence fragments? Fine in writing, as long as you can carry it off. Not for amateurs, and not for formal writing, but okay in more places than you might think.

There is the sentence "Yes. Coincidentally, that's also my answer to this question. Two birds with one stone. Great example of a non-trivial sentence that no verb. I wonder if there are others. Where is it enacted that we are only allowed to communicate in sentences with verbs? This question is, in a way, the wrong way round: why, given the universal use of verbless sentences by educated native speakers, does anyone think there is some kind of rule forbidding such use?

Not every verbless sentence good, though. Some verbless but clear, others not even clear. We are afforded fragments of a view lips, heels, skirt, shirt and an anecdote about men melting from her path. What this all amounts to is information not about Mina herself but about the characters around her and how she is viewed by them. And yet Mina is, although a latecomer, the heart and soul of this story, and we come to realize that her own self-understanding is not so different from that of her observers.

This sky huge with stars. Glorious, Mina thought, as she walked toward them. The cold in the air, the smell of cherries wafting up from the trees, the veal and endives cooking in the kitchen, the pool with its own moon, the stone house, the vines, the country full of velvet-eyed Frenchmen. Even the flicks of candlelight on those angry faces at the table was romantic. Everything was beautiful. Anything was possible. The whole world had been split open like a peach.

And these poor people, these poor fucking people. Were they too old to see it? All they had to do was reach out and pluck it and raise it to their lips, and they would taste it, too. Mina is, as we learn in the paragraph just before this one, 21 years old and sees herself rising into a world filled with possibilities; in fact, her imagination of her own future is very much in kind with that which her aunt Amanda has similarly envisioned.

It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among the rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you. Note first how she starts with a fragment not dissimilar to those which began this story. Note how Groff frontloads many of these little phrases with noun and verb pairings that give it a sense of action. Instead, she runs the phrases together by eliminating the helping verbs and leaving the -ing verb forms intact, the effect of which is to present ongoing sensory information removed from any sense of human agency.

Her world is alive and she is alive in it. This too has been scraped away, for indeed, we have learned in the story, that they are, in fact, too old to see it, too old and too wrapped up in the pettiness of their lives. They too can pluck that peach but of course, like Prufrock, they would not dare to do so—and Mina knows it, in a sense celebrating her own youth by damning their years.

I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to a be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.

Apparently I have more temptation to examine this grammar than I anticipated. It is an archaic verb meaning to enchant.