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catch up ("to reach and overtake"): Transitive or intransitive in BrE, strictly intransitive in AmE (to catch somebody up/to catch up with somebody). A transitive form exists in AmE, with a different meaning: to catch somebody up means that the subject will help the object catch up, rather the opposite of the BrE transitive meaning.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
The future in the past is a grammatical tense where the time reference is in the future with respect to a vantage point that is itself in the past. In English, future in the past is not always considered a separate tense, but rather as either a subcategory of future [1] or past [2] tense and is typically used in narrations of past events:
Apart from the special cases referred to in the sections above, many other dependent clauses use a tense that might not logically be expected – in particular the present tense is used when the reference is to future time, and the past tense is used when the reference is to a hypothetical situation (in other words, the form with will is ...
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
In linguistics, the prospective aspect (abbreviated PROSP or PRSP) is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time. [1] One way to view tenses in English and many other languages is as a combination of a reference time (past, present, or future) in which a situation takes place, and the time of a particular event relative to the reference time ...
English is an example of a language with no general imperfective. The English progressive is used to describe ongoing events, but can still be used in past tense, such as "The rain was beating down". Habitual situations do not have their own verb form (in most dialects), but the construction "used to" conveys past habitual action, as in I used ...
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).