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Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: need (needs/need) – needed – needed: Weak: Regular except in the use of need in place of needs in some contexts, by analogy with can, must, etc.; [4] see English modal verbs: ought – (no other forms) Defective: Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: pay – paid – paid overpay ...
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use – and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called preterite) or the past participle.
A language may have more than one regular conjugation pattern. French verbs, for example, follow different patterns depending on whether their infinitive ends in -er, -ir or -re (complicated slightly by certain rules of spelling). A verb which does not follow the expected pattern based on the form of its infinitive is considered irregular.
A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
The table at the right shows the main verb forms, with examples for -ar, -er and -ir verbs (based on parlar 'to speak', vider 'to see', and audir 'to hear'). The simple past, future, and conditional tenses correspond to semantically identical compound tenses (composed of auxiliary verbs plus infinitives or past participles).
Conjugation is the variation in the endings of verbs (inflections) depending on the person (I, you, we, etc), tense (present, future, etc.) and mood (indicative ...
Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs.
The -ar conjugation class is the largest of the three classes, and it is the only one open to neologisms, such as clicar ("to click" with a mouse). Each conjugation class has its own distinctive set of some 50 inflectional suffixes: cant/ar → cant/ou ("he sang"), vend/er → vend/eu ("he sold"), part/ir → part/iu ("he left"). Some suffixes ...