Regular and irregular verbs
A regular verb is any
In
The classification of verbs as regular or irregular is to some extent a subjective matter. If some conjugational
Development
When a language develops some type of
Irregularities in verb conjugation (and other
Irregularities may also arise from suppletion – forms of one verb may be taken over and used as forms of another. This has happened in the case of the English word went, which was originally the past tense of wend, but has come to be used instead as the past tense of go. The verb be also has a number of suppletive forms (be, is, was, etc., with various different origins) – this is common for copular verbs in Indo-European languages.
The regularity and irregularity of verbs is affected by changes taking place by way of analogy – there is often a tendency for verbs to switch to a different, usually more regular, pattern under the influence of other verbs. This is less likely when the existing forms are very familiar through common use – hence among the most common verbs in a language (like be, have, go, etc.) there is often a greater incidence of irregularity. (Analogy can occasionally work the other way, too – some irregular English verb forms such as shown, caught and spat have arisen through the influence of existing strong or irregular verbs.)
Types of pattern
The most straightforward type of regular verb conjugation pattern involves a single class of verbs, a single
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 spelling). A verb which does not follow the expected pattern based on the form of its infinitive is considered irregular.
In some languages, however, verbs may be considered regular even if the specification of one of their forms is not sufficient to predict all of the rest; they have more than one principal part. In Latin, for example, verbs are considered to have four principal parts (see Latin conjugation for details). Specification of all of these four forms for a given verb is sufficient to predict all of the other forms of that verb – except in a few cases, when the verb is irregular.
To some extent it may be a matter of convention or subjective preference to state whether a verb is regular or irregular. In English, for example, if a verb is allowed to have three principal parts specified (the bare infinitive, past tense and past participle), then the number of irregular verbs will be drastically reduced (this is not the conventional approach, however). The situation is similar with the strong verbs in
Irregularity in spelling only
It is possible for a verb to be regular in pronunciation, but irregular in spelling. Examples of this are the English verbs lay and pay. In terms of pronunciation, these make their past forms in the regular way, by adding the /d/ sound. However their spelling deviates from the regular pattern: they are not spelt (spelled) "layed" and "payed" (although the latter form is used in some e.g. nautical contexts as "the sailor payed out the anchor chain"), but laid and paid. This contrasts with fully regular verbs such as sway and stay, which have the regularly spelt past forms swayed and stayed. The English present participle is never irregular in pronunciation, with the exception that singeing irregularly retains the e to distinguish it from singing.
Linguistic study
In linguistic analysis, the concept of regular and irregular verbs (and other types of
Regular and irregular verbs are also of significance in
In
When languages are being compared informally, one of the few quantitative statistics which are sometimes cited is the number of irregular verbs. These counts are not particularly accurate for a wide variety of reasons, and academic linguists are reluctant to cite them. But it does seem that some languages have a greater tolerance for paradigm irregularity than others.
By language
English
With the exception of the highly irregular verb
The rules for the formation of the inflected parts of regular verbs are given in detail in the article on English verbs. In summary they are as follows:
- The third person singular present tense is formed by adding the ending -s (or -es after certain letters) to the plain form. When the plain form ends with the letter -y following a consonant, this becomes -ies. The ending is pronounced /s/ after a voiceless consonant sound (as in hops, halts, packs, bluffs, laughs), or /z/ after a voiced consonant or vowel sound (as in robs, lends, begs, sings, thaws, flies, sighs), but /ɪz/ after a sibilant(passes, pushes, marches).
- The past tense and past participle are identical; they are formed with the ending -ed, which as in the previous case has three different pronunciations (/t/, /d/, /ɪd/). Certain spelling rules apply, including the doubling of consonants before the ending in forms like conned and preferred. There is some variation in the application of these spelling rules with some rarer verbs, and particularly with verbs ending -c (panic–panicked, zinc–zinc(k)ed, arc–arc(k)ed, etc.), meaning that these forms are not fully predictable, but such verbs are not normally listed among the irregular ones. (The verbs lay and pay, however, are commonly listed as irregular, despite being regular in pronunciation – their past forms have the anomalous spellings laid and paid.)
- The present participle/gerund is formed by adding -ing, again with the application of certain spelling rules similar to those that apply with -ed.
The irregular verbs of English are described and listed in the article English irregular verbs (for a more extensive list, see List of English irregular verbs). In the case of these:
- The third person singular present tense is formed regularly, except in the case of the
- The past tense and past participle forms are the forms most commonly made in irregular fashion. About 200 verbs in normal use have irregularities in one or other (or usually both) of these forms. They may derive from Germanic strong verbs, as with sing–sang–sung or rise–rose–risen, or from weak verbs which have come to deviate from the standard pattern in some way (teach–taught–taught, keep–kept–kept, build–built–built, etc.). (The past participle often ends in "n", " d" or "ed".) The past and past participle forms change in spelling sometimes.
- The present participle/gerund is formed regularly, in -ing (except for those defective verbs, such as the modals, which lack such a form).
Common irregular verbs
Some examples of common irregular verbs in English, other than modals, are:[3]
- arise
- be
- come
- do
- eat
- fall
- get
- give
- go
- have
- hear
- know
- lend
- make
- run
- say
- see
- take
- think
- wear
- drink
- put
- cut
- catch
- drive
Other languages
For regular and irregular verbs in other languages, see the articles on the grammars of those languages. Particular articles include, for example:
- Dutch conjugation
- French verbs and French conjugation
- German verbs and German conjugation
- Ancient Greek verbs (for verbs in Modern Greek, see Modern Greek grammar)
- Irish conjugation
- Italian conjugation
- Japanese verb conjugation and Japanese irregular verbs
- Latin conjugation
- Portuguese conjugation
- Spanish verbs, Spanish conjugation and Spanish irregular verbs
- Welsh has five irregular verbs whose conjugations differ between spoken Welsh and the literary language.
Some grammatical information relating to specific verbs in various languages can also be found in Wiktionary.
Constructed languages
Most natural languages, to different extents, have a number of irregular verbs. Artificial auxiliary languages usually have a single regular pattern for all verbs (as well as other parts of speech) as a matter of design, because inflectional irregularities are considered to increase the difficulty of learning and using a language. Other constructed languages, however, need not show such regularity, especially if they are designed to look similar to natural ones.
The auxiliary language Interlingua has some irregular verbs, principally esser "to be", which has an irregular present tense form es "is" (instead of expected esse), an optional plural son "are", an optional irregular past tense era "was/were" (alongside regular esseva), and a unique subjunctive form sia (which can also function as an imperative). Other common verbs also have irregular present tense forms, namely vader "to go" — va, ir "to go" — va (also shared by the present tense of vader), and haber "to have" — ha.
References
- ISBN 0-06-095840-5.
- ^ say - Definition and pronunciation | Oxford Advanced American Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com
- ^ Hacker, Diana (2017). The Bedford Handbook. curriculum solutions. pp. 343–344.