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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 ...
English has a number of ergative verbs: verbs which can be used either intransitively or transitively, where in the intransitive use it is the subject that is receiving the action, and in the transitive use the direct object is receiving the action while the subject is causing it.
Strong verb may refer to: Germanic strong verb, a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel; Strong inflection, a system of verb conjugation contrasted with an alternative "weak" system in the same language; Irregular verb, any verb whose conjugation does not follow the typical pattern of the language to which it belongs
This has happened with the strong verbs (and some groups of weak verbs) in English; patterns such as sing–sang–sung and stand–stood–stood, although they derive from what were more or less regular patterns in older languages, are now peculiar to a single verb or small group of verbs in each case, and are viewed as irregular.
Within English, the modal verb will is also related to the noun will and the regular lexical verb will (as in "She willed him on"). Early Germanic did not inherit any Proto-Indo-European forms to express the future tense , and so the Germanic languages have innovated by using auxiliary verbs to express the future (this is evidenced in Gothic ...
A strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/adjective declension which can be contrasted with an alternative system in the same language, which is then known as a weak inflection. The term strong was coined with reference to the Germanic verb , but has since been used of other phenomena in these and other languages, which may or ...
An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-es" (fishes).