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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 ).
Verbs with devoicing of the ending and no other irregularity: burn, dwell, learn, smell, spell, spill and spoil. Most of these have regular -ed forms as alternatives. Verbs continuing the Rückumlaut pattern: bring–brought, buy–bought, seek–sought, sell–sold, teach–taught, tell–told, and think–thought.
Skim is a verb, and as the pattern describes its behaviour it is in upper case. The verb is then followed by a noun group, a preposition (either off or from) and a second noun group. This pattern applies for example to "She skimmed the cream off the milk". The choice of preposition is limited to those two options, which is why they are ...
Verbs which in any way deviate from these rules (there are around 200 such verbs in the language) are classed as irregular. A language may have more than one regular conjugation pattern. French verbs, for example, follow different patterns depending on whether their infinitive ends in -er, -ir or -re (complicated slightly by certain rules of ...
Verbs are used in certain patterns which require the presence of specific arguments in the form of objects and other complements of particular types. (A given verb may be usable in one or more of these patterns.) A verb with a direct object is called a transitive verb. Some transitive verbs have an indirect object in addition to the direct object.
A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
A reciprocal construction (abbreviated RECP) is a grammatical pattern in which each of the participants occupies both the role of agent and patient with respect to the other. An example is the English sentence John and Mary criticized each other: John criticized Mary, and Mary criticized John.