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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 ...
Some originally weak verbs have taken on strong-type forms by analogy with strong verbs. These include dig, dive (when dove is used as the past tense), hide, prove (when proven is used as the past participle), saw (past participle sawn), sew (past participle sewn), show (past participle shown), spit, stick, strew, string, and wear (analogy with ...
For example, the verb write has the principal parts write (base form), wrote (past), and written (past participle); the remaining inflected forms (writes, writing) are derived regularly from the base form. Some irregular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms (as the regular verbs do), as with send–sent–sent.
The first example involves a present participle and the two latter examples involves a past participle. All present participles end with an -ande suffix. In Norwegian, the present participle may be used to form adjectives or adverbs denoting the possibility or convenience of performing the action prescribed by the verb.
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:
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.
Examples which combine both types of tense marking include the French passé composé, which has an auxiliary verb together with the inflected past participle form of the main verb; and the Irish past tense, where the proclitic do (in various surface forms) appears in conjunction with the affixed or ablaut-modified past tense form of the main verb.
In modern English, the auxiliary verb used to form the present perfect is always to have. A typical present perfect clause thus consists of the subject, the auxiliary have/has, and the past participle (third form) of main verb. Examples: I have done so much in my life. You have gone to school. He has already arrived in America.