Tense and Aspects

Dynamic verb
An active or dynamic verb is a verb that shows continued or progressive action on the part of the subject. This is the opposite of a stative verb.

Dynamic verbs have duration, that is, they occur over time. This time may or may not have a defined endpoint, and may or may not yet have occurred. These distinctions lead to various forms related to tense and aspect. For example, a dynamic verb may be said to have a durative aspect if there is not a defined endpoint, or a punctual aspect if there is a defined endpoint.

Examples of dynamic verbs are 'to run', 'to hit', 'to intervene', 'to savour' and 'to go'.

An outstanding feature of modern English is its limited use of the simple present tense of dynamic verbs. Generally, the progressive tense is required to express an action taking place in the present (I am going). The simple present usually refers to a customary action (I go every day), a general rule (water runs downhill), a future action in some subordinate clauses (if I go) or the historical present (President signs bill).

A dynamic verb expressess a wide range of actions which may be physical (to run), mental (to ponder) or perceptual (to see) as opposed to a stative verb which purely expresses a state in which there is no obvious action (to know, believe, suppose etc.).

Stative verb
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.

Examples of sentences with stative verbs:

I am tired.
I have two children.
I like the color blue.
I think they want something to eat.
We believe in many Gods...
The case contains six bottles.
This would imply that we didn't care.
In languages where the copula is a verb, it is a stative verb, as is the case in English be. Some other English stative verbs are believe, know, seem, and have. All these generally denote states rather than actions. However, it should be noted that verbs like have and be, which are usually stative, can be dynamic in certain situations. Think is stative when it means "believe", but not when it means "consider". The following are not stative:

You are being silly.
She is having a baby.
Quiet please, I am thinking.
Some languages morphologically distinguish stative and dynamic verbs, or transform one into another. Arabic, for example, can use the same verbal root to mean ride (stative) and mount (dynamic).

Propositions that are expressed in most Indo-European languages by noun qualifiers (such as adjectives) are instead expressed by stative verbs in many other languages. In Japanese, so-called i-adjectives are in fact best analyzed as intransitive stative verbs (for example, takai alone means "is high/expensive", and samukunakatta means was not cold).

The same verb may act as stative or dynamic. An English phrase like "he plays the piano" may be either stative or dynamic, according to context.

Some languages use the same verbs for dynamic and stative situations, while other use different (if often etymologically related) verbs with some kind of qualifiers to distinguish between the usages. A stative verb is often intransitive, while a corresponding one would be transitive. Compare, for example, modern English with modern Danish.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stative_verb