Stative verb

In linguistics, a stative verb is one that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs are static or unchanging throughout their entire duration, whereas dynamic verbs describe a process that changes over time. Many languages distinguish between these two types in terms of how they can be used grammatically.

Some languages use the same verbs for dynamic and stative situations, while others use different (but often related) verbs with some kind of qualifiers to distinguish between the usages. Certain verbs may act as either stative or dynamic. A phrase like "he plays the piano" may be either stative or dynamic, according to context. When in a given context the verb "play" relates to a state (an interest or a profession) he" could be an amateur who enjoys music or a professional pianist. The dynamic interpretation emerges from a specific context in the case "play" describes an action, "what does he do on Friday evening? He plays the piano".

The distinction between stative and dynamic verbs can be correlated with:

A stative verb is often intransitive, while a corresponding dynamic verb would be transitive. The following table illustrates this distinction for several verbs in modern English, Swedish, and German:

Some languages make distinctions between stative and dynamic verbs in sentences. In German, for instance, several prepositions (Wechselpräpositionen – "changing prepositions") take different noun cases when they accompany stative and dynamic verbs. For stative verbs, the corresponding preposition takes the dative case, whereas for dynamic verbs, the preposition takes the accusative case. For example:

The same scheme also applies with stative and dynamic verbs in general, i.e. when the verb is stative (albeit the dynamic counterpart is non-existent), the preposition will always take dative, and vice versa.

In English and many other languages, stative and dynamic verbs differ in whether or not they can use the progressive aspect. Dynamic verbs such as "go" can be used in the progressive (I am going to school) whereas stative verbs such as "know" cannot (*I am knowing the answer). In other languages, statives can be used in the progressive as well: in Korean, for example, the sentence 미나가 인호를 사랑하고있다 (Mina is loving Inho) is perfectly valid.

...
Wikipedia