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Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: need (needs/need) – needed – needed: Weak: Regular except in the use of need in place of needs in some contexts, by analogy with can, must, etc; [4] see English modal verbs: ought – (no other forms) Defective: Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: pay – paid – paid overpay ...
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use – and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called preterite) or the past participle.
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For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made). In some cases the past tense is regular but the past participle is not, as with show–showed–shown.
These oddities are a part of the standard grammar. These special cases have crept into the language as a result of the effort to keep it naturalistic. Most of these irregularities also exist in Interlingua's source languages; English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent German and Russian. This feature of the language ...
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 ...
Other functions vary from language to language. For example, although in its basic meanings, to be is a stative verb, English puts it to work as a dynamic verb in fixed collocations (You are being very annoying). The copula is the most irregular verb in many Indo-European languages.
Regularization is a linguistic phenomenon observed in language acquisition, language development, and language change typified by the replacement of irregular forms in morphology or syntax by regular ones. Examples are "gooses" instead of "geese" in child speech and replacement of the Middle English plural form for "cow", "kine", with "cows". [1]