Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Though the list of verbs irregular in the preterite or past participle is long, the list of irregular present tense verbs is very short. Excepting modal verbs like "shall", "will", and "can" that do not inflect at all in the present tense, there are only four of them (only two if pronunciation is ignored), not counting compounds including them:
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).
The past participle is been, and the present participle and gerund is the regular being. The base form be is used regularly as an infinitive, imperative and (present) subjunctive. For archaic forms, see the next section. English has a number of modal auxiliary verbs which are defective.
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.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Participle. In linguistics, a participle (from Latin participium 'a sharing, partaking'; abbr. PTCP) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. [1] More narrowly, participle has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face ".
Inflected forms of verbs. A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form (go, write, climb), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular. The -s form (goes, writes, climbs), used as the present indicative in ...
The present perfect tense is illustrated by I've left it somewhere; the past perfect (also called the preterite perfect) tense by I'd left it somewhere.: 140–141 A full description of their uses is necessarily complex: the discussion in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is long and intricate.: 139–148