What are linking verbs?

Q: What the heck is a linking verb, and why would I teach it?

A: When learning any new verb, it's important for learners to know its complementation pattern, or what can follow it. Some verbs are intransitive, some transitive. Some verbs take infinitival complements (e.g., I want to go,) and some don't (e.g., *I enjoy to go; that star indicates something ungrammatical). Some allow content clauses or "noun clauses" (e.g., I hope that it works), and on it goes. Linking verbs present a number of other combinations that students need to be aware of.

A linking verb is a verb that takes a predicative complement (remember: complements complete & compliments praise) but not an object. Typically the complement is in the form of an adjective phrases (e.g., it looks good), noun phrases (e.g., it became a problem), or preposition phrases (e.g., it is against the law). In other words, it is a verb that can be followed by a phrase and which attributes the properties represented by that phase (identity, size, location, etc.) to the subject.

Interestingly, the term linking verb doesn't appear in any of the grammars mentioned in the introduction. It's a 20^th century gloss of copulative, which means basically the same thing¹. The CGEL uses the term complex intransitive both for clauses and the verbs that head them. This has some advantages, as we'll see at the end, but is so unfamiliar to teachers and learners that it is unlikely to be adopted.

The most common linking verb is be. Others include sensing verbs: feel, look, smell, sound, taste, seem, and appear; verbs indicating a continuation of state: remain, keep, continue, and stay; and verbs of change of state: become, get, go, grow, and turn. This covers the most central members, but it is not a complete list.

Here are some more examples with the linking verb underlined and an AdjP complement in bold:

1. He seems very nice.
2. It was good.
3. She became pregnant.
4. The soup smelled more delicious than ever.

Most linking verbs can take all three types of complement (i.e., AdjP, NP, or PP), but that is not always the case as illustrated in 9 and 11 below:

5. It seems a crying shame. (NP)
6. He doesn't seem up to it. (PP)
7. It is pie. (NP)
8. It smelled like pie. (PP)
9. It smelled pie. (here the NP pie is an object, not a predicative complement.)
10. Did she become president? (NP)
11. *Did she become on the desk? (PP)

Linking verb smell does not take NP complements. In 9, we have the transitive verb smelled, not the linking verb of 8. You can see that in 7, it and pie are the same thing, but in 8, it is something else, perhaps an animal, but not pie. Linking verb become doesn't take PP complements, and so 11 is simply ungrammatical.

In the introduction, we saw linking verbs defined as "verbs that express state or feeling rather than action," and I said that this needed some reconsideration. There are some elements of truth in it: some linking verbs are indeed more common in stative verb phrases (VP). We don't typically say *the table is seeming brown or *the soup is feeling hot. But lots of verbs that are not linking verbs (e.g., have, & like) typically appear in stative VPs, and there are many linking verbs that make dynamic VPs (e.g., The kids are getting rowdy/tired.) So it's best to forget the notion that linking verbs expresses states rather than actions and focus just on the complementation pattern.

And certainly, a number of linking verbs do express feelings (e.g., I felt safe) but many don't (e.g., goldfinches turn brown in the summer) and conversely, many verbs expressing feelings aren't linking verbs (e.g., I'm enjoying the concert). Again, we should stay focused on type of complements allowed.

Some complications
It can get a little complicated though, because some verbs take multiple complements, usually with a direct object, and these are not consistently included with lists of linking verbs:

12. That makes me + happy. (Direct Object:NP + Predicative Complement:AdjP)
13. That makes us + part of something bigger. (Direct Object:NP + Predicative Complement:NP)

This is why the CGEL uses the terms complex intransitive and complex transitive. Verbs like make that take complements of the form Direct Object + Predicative Complement would, in their terminology, be complex transitive.

Also, as we saw with 8 and 9 above, some verbs have different meanings, some of which are linking and some of which aren't². One example is feel, which takes predicate AdjP complements in the sense of one's emotions and direct objects in the sense of touching something:

14. She felt miserable. (AdjP; linking)
15. She felt his hand. (Obj; transitive)

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[1] Reed and Kellogg address this point very briefly calling these verbs copula and their complements predicate adjectives and predicate nouns.

[2] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language treats all these as simply "verbs taking predicative complements" (p. 263).