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For example, bore and found may be past tenses of bear and find, but may also represent independent (regular) verbs of different meaning. Another example is lay, which may be the past tense of lie, but is also an independent verb (regular in pronunciation, but with irregular spelling: lay–laid–laid).
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 past tense and past participle are identical; they are formed with the ending -ed, which as in the previous case has three different pronunciations (/t/, /d/, /ɪd/). Certain spelling rules apply, including the doubling of consonants before the ending in forms like conned and preferred.
The past tense of regular verbs is made by adding -d or -ed to the base form of the verb, while those of irregular verbs are formed in various ways (such as see→saw, go→went, be→was/were). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form also serves as a past participle. For full details of past tense formation, see English verbs.
The simple past is used when the event happened at a particular time in the past, or during a period which ended in the past (i.e. a period that does not last up until the present time). This time frame may be explicitly stated, or implicit in the context (for example the past tense is often used when describing a sequence of past events). [7]
It is formed by combining had (the past tense of auxiliary have), been (the past participle of be), and the present participle of the main verb. Uses of the past perfect progressive are analogous to those of the present perfect progressive, except that the point of reference is in the past. For example: I was tired because I had been running.
The absolute/conjunct distinction is retained in the habitual present tense (also used as, and often referred to as, the future tense) of regular and many irregular verbs. In these cases, the independent form of the verb ends in -(a)idh (cf. Old Irish gaibid above), while the dependent form drops this ending (cf. Old Irish ·gaib above).
Past tense: pisał ("was writing, used to write, wrote", imperfective); napisał ("wrote", perfective) In at least the East Slavic and West Slavic languages, there is a three-way aspect differentiation for verbs of motion with the determinate imperfective, indeterminate imperfective, and perfective.