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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 ...
The past participle is been, which is pronounced with an /ɪ/ sound in US English, and the present participle and gerund forms are regular: being. For more details see Indo-European copula . As mentioned above, apart from its other irregularities, the verb do , which is pronounced with an /u/ sound, has the third person present indicative does ...
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:
In English, for example, if a verb is allowed to have three principal parts specified (the bare infinitive, past tense and past participle), then the number of irregular verbs will be drastically reduced (this is not the conventional approach, however).
Modern English past participles derive from these forms (although the ge-prefix, which became y-in Middle English, has now been lost — except in some rare dialects such as the Dorset dialect, where it takes the form of a-). Old English present participles were marked with an ending in -ende (or -iende for verbs whose infinitives ended in -ian).
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). In some cases the past tense is regular but the past participle is not, as with show–showed–shown. For uses of the past participle, see § Non-finite forms below.
It is a past tense that indicates an action taken once in the past that was completed at some point in the past (translated: "<verb>ed"). This is as opposed to the imperfect (l'imparfait), used in expressing repeated, continual, or habitual past actions (often corresponding to English's past continuous was/were <verb>ing or habitual used to ...
In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb will or shall. For example: Lucy will go to school. (action, future) Barack Obama became the President of the United States ...