Forms of verbs

We have already discussed some forms of English verbs, such as performs, performed and perform. In English, a verb lexeme has at most five distinct forms, as illustrated here with GIVE:

(28) GIVE

a. third person singular present tense:                      gives

e.g. Mary gives a lecture every year.

b. past tense:                                                                  gave

e.g. Mary gave a lecture last week.

c. progressive participle:                                              giving

e.g. Mary is giving a lecture today.

d. perfect or passive participle:                                   given

e.g. Mary has given a lecture today.

The lecture is always given by Mary.

e. basic form (used everywhere else):                        give

e.g. Mary may give a lecture.

Mary wants to give a lecture.

Mary and John give a lecture every year.

The contrast between present at (28a) and past at (28b) is a contrast of tense. The other dimensions of contrast manifested in (28a) are person (third person versus the rest) and number (singular versus plural, just as for nouns and pronouns). However, because only one word form (gives) exhibits these contrasts, they play a much smaller inflectional role in modern English verbs than in Old English verbs.

For the form labelled ‘perfect or passive participle’, two examples are given, because perfect and passive contexts can be distinguished clearly; however, it is a peculiarity of English verb morphology that the corresponding forms are always the same. Another way of putting this is that, for any verb V, the grammatical words ‘perfect participle of V’ and ‘passive participle of V’ are expressed by the same word form.

I said that a verb lexeme has at most five forms. In fact, most verbs have only four forms, because the past tense and the perfect (or passive) participle forms are the same. This is true for all regular verbs (those that form the past tense with the suffix -ed), such as PERFORM:

(29) PERFORM

a. third person singular present tense:                 performs

b. past tense:                                                             performed

c. progressive participle:                                          performing

d. perfect or passive participle:                               performed

e. basic form (used everywhere else):                    perform

When two grammatical words that are distinct for some lexemes are systematically identical for others, as here, these forms are said to be syncretized, or to exhibit syncretism. The same syncretism also occurs with some irregular verbs, such as DIG and STING (past = perfect participle dug, stung) and all those that use the suffix -t, such as BEND,FEEL, and TEACH (bent, felt, taught). In all, 150 or so verbs are irregular in that they do not use the -ed suffix. I will not list them all here, however, because the study of these irregularities belongs to grammar rather than to word-formation.

Other verbs or verb-like words whose behavior belongs to grammar rather than word-formation are the auxiliaries, such as BE and HAVE, and modals, such as CAN, MUST, MAY. But they deserve mention here because their various forms distinguish an unusually small or large range of grammatical words. Instead of the usual verbal maximum of five forms, modals distinguish only two (e.g. can, could) or even just one (e.g. must), while BE distinguishes eight (am, is, are, was, were, being, been, be).