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The preterite and past participle forms of irregular verbs follow certain patterns. These include ending in -t (e.g. build, bend, send), stem changes (whether it is a vowel, such as in sit, win or hold, or a consonant, such as in teach and seek, that changes), or adding the [n] suffix to the past participle form (e.g. drive, show, rise ...
Differences between the past tense and past participle (as in sing–sang–sung, rise–rose–risen) generally appear in the case of verbs that continue the strong conjugation, or in a few cases weak verbs that have acquired strong-type forms by analogy – as with show (regular past tense showed, strong-type past participle shown).
The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made).
The past participle forms the perfect aspect with the auxiliary verb have: The chicken has eaten. 5. The past participle is used to form passive voice: The chicken was eaten. Such passive participles can appear in an adjectival phrase: The chicken eaten by the children was contaminated. Adverbially:
The past tense and past participle are identical; they are formed with the ending -ed, which as in the previous case has three different pronunciations (/t/, /d/, /ɪd/). Certain spelling rules apply, including the doubling of consonants before the ending in forms like conned and preferred .
English past participles have both active and passive uses. In a passive use, an object or preposition complement becomes zero, the gap being understood to be filled by the noun phrase the participle modifies (compare similar uses of the to-infinitive above). Uses of past participles and participial phrases introduced by them are as follows:
The past participle adjective repeated becomes repeatedly by adding -ly after it. [ citation needed ] Most adverbs form comparatives and superlatives by modification with more and most : often , more often , most often ; smoothly , more smoothly , most smoothly (see also comparison of adjectives , above).
The past tense of regular verbs is made by adding -d or -ed to the base form of the verb, while those of irregular verbs are formed in various ways (such as see→saw, go→went, be→was/were). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form also serves as a past participle. For full details of past tense formation, see English verbs.