A stative verb is one which asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property (possibly in relation to its other arguments). Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; they have no duration and no distinguished endpoint. Verbs which are not stative are often called dynamic verbs.
Some English stative verbs are 'know', 'have' and 'be'. Tests given by David Dowty for English statives are:
- Statives do not occur in the progressive (the * before a sentence means that it is ungrammatical to most native English speakers):
- John is running. (non-stative)
- *John is knowing the answer.
- They cannot be complements of 'force':
- I forced John to run.
- *I forced John to know the answer.
- They do not occur as imperatives.
- They cannot appear in the pseudo-cleft construction:
- What John did was run.
- *What John did was know the answer.
In some theories of formal semantics, including Dowty's, stative verbs have a logical form which is the lambda expression
l(x): [STATE x]
Apart from Dowty, Vendler and C.S. Smith have also written influential work on aspectual classification of verbs.
In many non-English languages, propositions expressed by adjectives in English are instead expressed by stative verbs.
