Transcript verbs - Gordon State College

VERBS
Identifying a verb is the easy part. The challenge comes in
knowing its various forms.
Traditionally, a verb is considered to have 3 principal parts:
present tense, past tense, past participle. If you had a
traditional grammar education (unlikely), you memorized
patterns like this:
Sing
Ring
See
Run
sang
rang
saw
ran
have sung
have rung
have seen
have run
The first verb is the present tense; the second is the past
tense. Let’s stop there for the moment.
The pure, naked form of the verb is the infinitive.
An infinitive is to + verb:
to run
to be
to cry
to write
to do
to drive
to see
to lift
to laugh
These are the forms you find in the dictionary. If
you want to know how to say “went” in another
language, you probably won’t find “went” in the
dictionary. You can’t say “to went.” You say “to
go.” So you have to look up “go” & then put it in
the past tense of that language.
We don’t use infinitives nearly as frequently as we do
conjugated verbs. “Conjugated” means that it matches
the person:
to run
present
I run
we run
you run y’all run
he runs they run
past
I ran
we ran
you ran y’all ran
he ran they ran
“To run” is easy. Let’s look at “to be”:
to be
I am
we are
you are y’all are
he is
they are
I was
we were
you were y’all were
he was
they were
Besides the infinitive, there are 4 other verb forms
to learn for each verb: present, past, present
participle, past participle.
Present & past are fairly easy:
laugh, laughed
touch, touched
play, played
Most verbs form the present by dropping the “to”
from the infinitive, & they form the past by
adding “-d” or “-ed” to the present. BUT there
are tons of irregular past tense verbs. Go to the
next slide for a brief list.
Yeah. Now is the time to be glad you speak
English as your native language & don’t have to
memorize all those irregular verbs.
The verb form in the third column on the previous
slide is the past participle. The past participle is
the form that goes with have, has, or had:
had laughed
had talked had jumped
Most past participles are the same as the past
tense: laughed/had laughed; talked/had talked;
jumped/had jumped. But there are a number of
irregularities:
ate/had eaten saw/had seen bit/had bitten
As an educated native speaker of English, you
automatically use the correct verb form.
However, far too many times, students say
“have went” or “have rang.” You should look
over the list of irregularities (make it big enough
to see) to be sure that you haven’t been using
the wrong form of a verb without realizing it.
(Linguist’s note: if everyone around you says “has
went,” you might choose to go with the flow, but
you should know what the correct form is in case
you find yourself surrounded by a group of
people who “know better.”)
OK, so we have the infinitive, the present,
the past, & the past participle. There’s
one more form that all verbs have: the
present participle.
running
singing
being telling
eating
You guessed it: you add –ing to the infinitive
(without “to”). Sometimes you have to
double the final consonant, but that’s just
one of those annoying spelling rules. At
least there aren’t any irregularities.
So although there are, traditionally, 3 principal
verb forms
present
ring
past
rang
past participle
(has) rung
there are really 5:
Infinitive present
to ring
to be
past
past part. present part.
ring
rang
(has) rung ringing
is/am/are was/were (has) been being
So if you know all 5, you know all forms the verb can
take.
Now for the hard part: what do we do with all
these parts?
English has 6 tenses:
present -- I talk
present perfect – I have talked
past
-- I talked past perfect -- I had talked
future -- I will talk future perfect -- I will have talked
The future always has “will.” The perfect tenses always
have “have/has/had.” So the future perfect has “will” &
“have.”
Chances are that you, as a native speaker of English, use 4 of the 6 tenses
correctly with few problems. But the past perfect & future perfect tenses
are sometimes problematic even for native speakers.
We all know what present, past, & future are. You need to know that
“perfect” means “complete,” so all perfect tenses are past tenses, even,
believe it or not, the future perfect.
The present perfect is complete but has an intimate connection to the
present:
I have lived here for 14 years.
My living here is complete up to this point. The difference between
I lived here for 14 years. & I have lived here for 14 years.
is that in the second sentence, I continue to live here.
Now consider this: what’s the difference between the 2 sentences below?
I didn’t eat breakfast. -- I haven’t eaten breakfast.
In the first sentence, it’s all over. No chance I’m getting food. In the second,
I still may eat it.
Easy enough so far, right? Let’s look at the past perfect.
The past perfect tense is the past of the past.
We went to Scotland last year. We had made reservations,
but when we arrived, we found that the hotel had lost them.
“Went” is in the past. But even before “we went,” we made
reservations. So the making of the reservations happened
before the past event of “we went” & is, therefore, the past
of the past.
Also, “we arrived” is in the past. But before the action of our
arrival, the hotel lost the reservations. So the arrival is in
the past, but the loss of the reservations happened even
before that & is therefore the past of the past.
So what about the future perfect? If the past perfect is the past
of the past…you guessed it, right? The future perfect is the
past of the future:
We will have finished the paper by Friday.
Friday’s in the future. At some point between now & Friday, the
paper will be completed. It will be completed in Friday’s past.
Consider this timeline:
past perfect pres.perf. PRESENT fut.perf. future
____|_________|_________|_________|______|_____
past
|
This shows where each tense (time) occurs in reference to the
present. The past & present perfect actually occur at the
same time (e.g., I didn’t eat breakfast/I haven’t eaten
breakfast). Usage depends on whether you view the action
as totally in the past or as being involved with the present.
So now you know what to do with four of the
five verb forms. We didn’t discuss what to
do with the present participle (-ing). You
know how to use that, but we’ll be seeing
more of it, the past participle (had talked),
& the infinitive (to talk) after you’ve nailed
down the verb basics.
Click here to go to your assignment.
And here to go to the second one.
http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/verbs12.htm
http://www.grammar-quizzes.com/modal2d.html --do 6-16