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Though the list of verbs irregular in the preterite or past participle is long, the list of irregular present tense verbs is very short. Excepting modal verbs like "shall", "will", and "can" that do not inflect at all in the present tense, there are only four of them, not counting compounds including them:
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 ...
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 ...
This is also true of most irregular verbs that follow a variation of the weak conjugation, as can be seen in the list below. Differences between the past tense and past participle (as in sing–sang–sung, rise–rose–risen) generally appear in the case of verbs that continue the strong conjugation, or in a few cases weak verbs that have ...
Unlike the present perfect, the past perfect can readily be used with an adverb specifying a past time frame for the occurrence. For example, it is incorrect to say *I have done it last Friday (the use of last Friday, specifying the past time, would entail the use of the simple past, I did it, rather than the present perfect).
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.
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It has the following negative forms: third person singular present isn't, other present aren't (including first person for the question aren't I), first and third person singular past wasn't, and other past weren't. [8] The past participle is been, and the present participle and gerund is the regular being.