2 Regular and irregular verbs

A grammar book contains lots of rules to explain how language works but these rules aren't like the law; not all bits of language necessarily obey them. Some grammar rules are more like observations or generalisations that are true in very many cases but not all. It's like saying birds are warm-blooded creatures that have two wings and can fly. There are obvious exceptions: ostriches, penguins, and emus for a start. There are, in fact, quite a lot of flightless birds, though most are rare and many are extinct. It turns out that being able to fly means you can escape most dangerous situations and survive. Some of the so-called rules of English grammar are similar to our overarching statement about birds: they apply in most cases, but there are still exceptions.

Take the rule for forming the past tense. You add the bound morpheme -ed to the end of the verb. So want gives the past form wanted, clean gives cleaned, and ask gives asked. The pronunciation of the ending is slightly different in each case here, but let's focus on the written form for now.

Other verbs don't follow this regular pattern and so they have an unpredictable past tense form. For example, the past tense form of hide is not hided, but hid. And the past of bring is brought. Come and go become came and went when these actions have happened in the past.

We call verbs that don't follow the general past tense rule the irregular verbs. There are about 200 irregular verbs in English. Most irregular of these, that is, the one with the highest number of different forms, is also the most common. Of course, we are talking about the auxiliary verb be.

This verb has three forms in the present: am, are and is. And, unique among English verbs, it also has two past tense forms, was and were. There are other forms of the verb be, been and being that are used in multiword verbs which is where the main verb gets some help from an auxiliary verb.

We can take a closer look at multiword verbs, including have, to see how this works in practice. I have been here all along, where were you? They had thought of moving house before. We have tried to explain so many times. This form of the verb been, thought, and tried is called the past participle.

For regular verbs, the past participle is the same as the simple past. You can see this by looking again at example 3. "We have tried to explain so many times." "We have tried--" the past participle-- and "I tried--" the past tense-- both use the -ed ending. The same is true for verbs like lived and asked.

Some irregular verbs also use the same form as the past tense, like example 2, "they had thought of moving house before" and words like brought, stood, and found. But other irregular verbs have a different past participle form, like example 1. "I have been here all along, where were you?" We would use am in the present, "I am here"; was in the past, "I was here"; and been as the past participle, "I have been".

The same is true for words like bite, see, and throw, which are bit, saw, and threw in the past tense but bitten, seen, and thrown when used with have to make the past participle. There are also some irregular verbs, like cut and bet, which use the same form to signify the present, past, and past participle.

These are the rules for standard British English. However, some non-standard dialects used the two past forms slightly differently. For example, in some dialects, people might say, "I seen him do it" or, "I already done it," using the standard British English past participle as the past tense. In other dialects, people may say, "I've went" instead of "I've gone," or "I've gave" instead of "I've given," using the standard British English past tense as the past participle.

From a linguistic point of view, this isn't bad grammar or ungrammatical, and it's certainly not lazy in any way. In these examples, people are just following different rules from those used in standard British English. In most cases, the majority of verbs and speakers will follow the basic rules you've just encountered but keep an ear out for those dialectal differences; they are just one component that makes the analysis of language so very interesting.

These differences demonstrate that language cannot be reduced to a simple set of rules. Language is always in flux and will change depending on who is using it.