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English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
For more details, see English conditional sentences § Use of will and would in condition clauses. For the use of would after the verb wish and the expression if only, see § Expressions of wish. The auxiliary verbs could and might can also be used to indicate the conditional mood, as in the following: If the opportunity were here, I could do ...
This is a list of English auxiliary verbs, i.e. helping verbs, which include Modal verbs and Semi-modal verbs. See also auxiliary verbs , light verbs , and catenative verbs . Primary Auxiliary Verbs
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
For example, before the Great Vowel Shift, the verb keep (then pronounced /keːp/, slightly like "cap", or "cape" without the / j / glide) belonged to a group of verbs whose vowel was shortened in the past tense; this pattern is preserved in the modern past tense kept (similarly crept, wept, leapt, left).
An example is the verb have in the sentence I have finished my lunch. Here, the auxiliary have helps to express the perfect aspect along with the participle, finished. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. Research has been conducted ...
There are sentences in English in which a full verb is later 'picked up' by an auxiliary. The position is very similar to that of a noun being 'picked up' by a pronoun. [. . .] If the initial sentence, which contains the main verb, is not heard, all the remainder is unintelligible; it is, in fact, truly in code. The following example is from Firth:
The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the center of the sentence, such as he had hoped to try to open it. In most sentences, English marks grammatical relations only through word order. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it.