For my assignment this week, I decided to observe how my co-workers and my family use verbs differently in a conversation. Of course, work is a professional setting, whereas my family home serves as a casual setting. While working, my co-workers and managers used verbs like, "remove", "greet", "return", "reward", and etcetera. Most often my co-workers used verbs as verbs, like in, "Remember to greet every customer who comes in." However, they also unconsciously transformed several of their verbs into nouns, such as in the sentence, "Sleeping is not an excuse for being late." Sometimes my co-workers even used verbs as adjectives, "Those bickering women are causing a disturbance." While this is not particularly amazing or shocking, it is interesting to see how people use language once you're paying attention. In this week's readings, Gregory Pullum describes the syntactic differences between a noun and verb, which helped me understand …show more content…
My family tended to use simple terms such as, "eat", "sleep", "can", "go", and "leave", instead of more expressive words. Most of the verbs I observed my family using were quick and to the point, exhibiting simple requests and actions. While we don't need to explain complex tasks to each other like at work, I assumed that casual speech still contained complexity. However, something interesting I discovered is an increased use of strong verbs within casual speech. In my professional setting, some of the common words (remove, reward, perform, and ask) all rely on the strength of "-ed" or "-en" endings in the past tense (removed, rewarded, performed, and asked). Whereas the most common words in my casual setting (sleep, take, and bring) all transformed into strong verbs (slept, took, brought). Perhaps due to nature of casual speech, these strong verbs have survived, as words like "perform" and "reward" aren't as common in everyday