30 Chapter 3 Verbs, tense, aspect, and moodwe give in [2] the paradigm for the verb walk, with sample sentences exemplifying
how the forms are used:
[2] PARADIGM EXAMPLE SENTENCEpreterite walked She walked home.
PRIMARY FORMS 3rd singular present walks She walks home.
plain present walk They walk home.
plain form walk She should walk home.
SECONDARY FORMS gerund-participle walking She is walking home.
past participle walked She has walked home.Inflectional form vs shape
We explain below the various grammatical terms used to classify and label the
inflectional forms. But first we must note that walked and walk each appear twice in
the paradigm. To cater for this we need to draw a distinction between an inflectional
form and its shape.
By shape we mean spelling or pronunciation: spelling if we're talking about writ
ten English, pronunciation if we're talking about spoken English.
The preterite and the past participle are different inflectional forms but they have
the same shape walked. Similarly for the plain present and the plain form, which
share the shape walk.
In the case of the preterite and the past participle there is a very obvious reason
for recognising distinct inflectional forms even though the shape is the same: many
common verbs have DIFFERENT shapes for these inflectional forms. One isjly, as
shown in [1]: its preterite form has the shapejiew, while its past participle has the
shape jiown.
The reason for distinguishing the plain present from the plain form is less obvi
ous. We take up the issue in § 1.2 below.
Primary vs secondary forms
With one isolated exception that we take up in §8.4, primary forms show inflec
tional distinctions of tense (preterite vs present) and can occur as the sole verb in a
canonical clause. Secondary forms have no tense inflection and cannot occur as the
head of a canonical clause.
Preterite
The term preterite is used for an infiectionally marked past tense. That is, the
past tense is marked by a specific inflectional form of the verb rather than by
means of a separate auxiliary verb. By a past tense we mean one whose most cen
tral use is to indicate past time. The preterite of take is took, and when I say I took
them to school I am referring to some time in the past. The relation between tense
and time in English, however, is by no means straightforward, as we saw in Ch. 1,
§3, and it is important to be aware that preterite tense does not always signal past