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The base form or plain form of an English verb is not marked by any inflectional ending.. Certain derivational suffixes are frequently used to form verbs, such as -en (sharpen), -ate (formulate), -fy (electrify), and -ise/ize (realise/realize), but verbs with those suffixes are nonetheless considered to be base-form verbs.
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.
In linguistics, dative shift refers to a pattern in which the subcategorization of a verb can take on two alternating forms, the oblique dative form or the double object construction form. In the oblique dative (OD) form, the verb takes a noun phrase (NP) and a dative prepositional phrase (PP), the second of which is not a core argument.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
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 ...
Excluding four common irregular verbs, the principal parts of all other English verbs are the infinitive, preterite and past participle. All forms of these English verbs can be derived from the three principal parts. Four verbs have an unpredictable 3rd person singular form and the verb "to be" is so irregular it has seven separate forms.
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.
(The verb hoist behaves similarly to verbs in this group, but this was originally itself a past form of the now obsolete verb hoise; similarly clad was originally – and sometimes still is – a past form of clothe.) Verbs with coalescence of consonants and devoicing of the ending: bend, build, lend, rend, send, spend.