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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).
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.
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).
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:
Generally, the only inflected forms of an English verb are a third person singular present tense form ending in -s, a past tense (also called preterite), a past participle (which may be the same as the past tense), and a form ending in -ing that serves as a present participle and gerund.
In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle. For example: The enemy was defeated. Caesar was stabbed. The recipient of a sentence's action is referred to as the patient. In sentences using the active voice, the subject is the performer of the action—referred to as ...
The past participle of saw is normally sawn in BrE and sawed in AmE (as in sawn-off/sawed-off shotgun). [1]: 487 The past participle gotten is rarely used in modern BrE, which generally uses got except when fixed in old expressions such as ill-gotten gains and in the minority of dialects that retain the older form. The American dictionary ...