Irregular Verbs

The English language has a large number of 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. The other inflected parts of the verb—the third person singular present indicative in-[e]s, and the present participle and gerund form in-ing—are formed regularly in most cases. There are a few exceptions: the verb be has irregular forms throughout the present tense; the verbs have, do and say have irregular-[e]s forms; and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection. The irregular verbs 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, such as to facebook) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit, from sit).

Weak verbs in Modern English are sometimes mistakenly identifi ed with regular verbs. Although most weak verbs are indeed regular, there remain some which belong to the irregular group, for example spend, put, make, burn. Apart from drawing a clearer distinction between strong and weak verbs in relation to the regular and irregular division, the aim of this paper is to explain where the irregularity of these irregular weak verbs comes from and to gather possible relicts still present in Modern English. The paper discusses 56 such irregular weak verbs without vowel alternations and 9 archaisms preserving traces of such infl ection. The 56 irregular weak verbs are divided into groups according to the patterns they display and they are additionally marked depending on whether: (1) they have less common irregular preterite and past participle forms, which can be labelled as "literary" or "poetic," (2) they are literary themselves, (3) they have irregular preterite and past participle forms chiefl y in North American English, (4) they have regular variants. The initial plan included all irregular verbs but the extent of the problem coupled with the editorial limitations as to the size of the paper led to the following decisions: fi rst, to exclude the irregular strong verbs and save them for later analyses, and then, in the remaining irregular weak ones, to remove all those with vowel alternations (like keep, seek, lose, say) and to concentrate on the verbs without vowel alternations (investigated in the present paper). It is hoped that the aims of this paper as well as their realization can serve to make the content of the historical grammar course more meaningful to students by linking it to the problems present in Modern English and to the why-questions related to the subject of their studies.

PAROLE: Journal of Linguistics and Education

English verbs have unique inflectional markers which show the past tense. There are two inflectional markers that become the categorization of these verbs. The first marker is the additional morpheme [d] or [ed]. All verbs with this marker are categorized as regular verbs. The second marker is the verb morphophonemic change like the word ‘sing’ [+present] and ‘sang’ [+past]. The verbs of this kind are categorized as irregular’ verbs. Simply, the regular verbs are those whose changes can be morphophonemically predicted while irregular verbs are the ones whose changes are morphophonemically unpredictable. This research is aimed to figure out whether there are morphophonemic inflectional patterns for irregular verbs. This paper is descriptive qualitative research. The data were collected using observation with note taking technique. I analyzed the data using distributional method. The result of the analysis shows that there are four additional sounds added to the ’regular’ verbs such a...

Nordlyd, 2003

2017

After many exchanges with colleagues and a lot of refining work, we are in the capacity to present a detailed descriptive account of stress in English verbs.

2013

Title: Non-Standard –ed Forms of Selected Irregular Verbs: A Corpus-based Study of Presentday American English Author: Eric Wikstrom Supervisor: Larisa Oldireva Gustafsson