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English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. ... The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, ... a past tense (wrote), and ...
Regular in past tense and sometimes in past participle. must – (no other forms) Defective: 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 ...
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.
The perfect or preterite (past) tense of some Ancient Greek, [10] Gothic, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Old Norse verbs preserve this reduplication: Ancient Greek λύω lúō 'I free' vs. λέλυκα léluka "I have freed" Gothic hald "I hold" vs. haíhald (hĕhald) "I/he held" Latin currō "I run" vs. cucurrī "I ran" or "have run"
Part of the conjugation of the Spanish verb correr, "to run", the lexeme is "corr-". Red represents the speaker, purple the addressee (or speaker/hearer) and teal a third person. One person represents the singular number and two, the plural number. Dawn represents the past (specifically the preterite), noon the present and night the future.
That is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme RUN has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person singular form run (which also functions as the past participle and non-finite form), a past form ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners ...
With the exception of the highly irregular verb be, an English verb can have up to five forms: its plain form (or bare infinitive), a third person singular present tense, a past tense (or preterite), a past participle, and the -ing form that serves as both a present participle and gerund.
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).