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ought to: thou oughtest to; A few verbs have irregular thou forms: to be: thou art (or thou beest), thou wast / w ɒ s t / (or subjunctive thou wert; originally thou were) to have: thou hast, thou hadst; to do: thou dost / d ʌ s t / (or thou doest in non-auxiliary use) and thou didst; shall: thou shalt; will: thou wilt; A few others are not ...
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
Will is ambiguous in first-person statements, and shall is ambiguous in second- and third-person statements. A rule of prescriptive grammar was created to remove these ambiguities , but it requires that the hearer or reader understand the rule followed by the speaker or writer, which is usually not the case.
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.
Verbs ending in a consonant plus o also typically add -es: veto → vetoes. Verbs ending in a consonant plus y add -es after changing the y to an i: cry → cries. In terms of pronunciation, the ending is pronounced as / ɪ z / after sibilants (as in lurches), as / s / after voiceless consonants other than sibilants (as in makes), and as / z ...
Note that forms of the verb be are included regardless of whether or not they function as auxiliaries in the sense of governing another verb form. (For exceptions to this restriction, see § Inversion with other types of verb below.) A typical example of subject–auxiliary inversion is: a. Sam has read the paper. – Statement b. Has Sam read ...
The Old English and Early Middle English second person pronouns thou and ye (with variants) were used for singular and plural reference respectively with no T–V distinction. The earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for ye as a V pronoun in place of the singular thou exists in a Middle English text of 1225 composed in 1200. [16]
The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...