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Questão FC478751

Is other a verb?

Gramática (Grammatics)

FGV · 2025

Is other a verb?

 

Like many English words, other possesses great flexibility in meaning and function. Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun. In recent decades, other has increased its part-of-speech portfolio to include verb use, having acquired the meaning "to treat or consider (a person or a group of people) as alien to oneself or one's group.” Some people find it disconcerting when a word takes on a new part of speech, a process known as functional shift. The phenomenon is quite common, however -- our language contains many thousands of words which are reported to have been formed in this fashion.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/other.

 

The stretch of text “many thousands of words which are reported to have been formed in this fashion” is an example of impersonal passive voice – which shows, for instance, what an unspecified group of people say or believe. One instance of this type of passive is

  1. The family were believed to have gone missing as a result of extreme weather events.
  2. NGO’s now have their likelihood of securing grant funding for impactful social projects increased with grants from the UNO.
  3. The spectators were taken aback seeing the chaos caused by the fall of the grandstand.
  4. It is hard to tell whether she is interested in studying hard for the whole summer or not.
  5. The huge black hole was located after telescope James Web was capable of seeing some of the most distant galaxies in our Universe.
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The family were believed to have gone missing as a result of extreme weather events. (Acreditava-se que a família havia desaparecido devido a eventos climáticos extremos.)

A frase exemplifica a voz passiva impessoal porque desloca o foco para a ação informada, não para quem a pratica. A construção were believed to have combina uma forma passiva do verbo "believe" com o infinitivo perfeito, indicando uma crença sobre um fato já ocorrido.

O sujeito gramatical ("the family") recebe a ação, enquanto o agente fica indeterminado: não se diz quem acredita nisso. Esse tipo de estrutura é frequente em textos jornalísticos e acadêmicos quando se reporta opiniões ou informações sem atribuição precisa.

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