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Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected ...
-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle , as a gerund , and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective . The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling , and in names such as Browning .
Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, [5] while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. [1] This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing.
Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit , from ...
Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects). Many English verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, he go is not (except in the subjunctive, as "They requested that he go with them").
The importance of irregular verbs is enhanced by the fact that they often include the most commonly used verbs in the language (including verbs such as be and have in English, their equivalents être and avoir in French, sein and haben in German, etc.). In historical linguistics the concept of irregular verbs is not so commonly referenced.
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 ...
Adjectives in -ly can form inflected comparative and superlative forms (such as friendlier, friendliest, lovelier, loveliest), but most adverbs with this ending do not (a word such as sweetly uses the periphrastic forms more sweetly, most sweetly). For more details see Adverbs and Comparison in the English grammar article.