A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§ 1.2 Verb-fonns and shape sharing^33

In the [ii] examples the bracketed parts are alike in that they both modify the head

noun people. In [iia] the brackets surround a clause with the verb earning as head; in

[iib] we have an adjective phrase with the adjective affl uent as head. Again, earning and

affluent are thus functionally similar in that each heads an expression modifying a noun.

The past participle

There is a second inflectional fonn of the verb that contains the tenn 'participle' as

part of its name: the past participle. It occurs in two major constructions, perfect

and passive, illustrated here with the past participle of the verb fly :

[5] a. She has flown fro m Dallas.

b. She may have flown to Brussels. }

11 a. The Brussels-Dallas route is flown by only two airlines.

b. A route [flown by only two airlines] is bound to be expensive. }

[perfect]

[passive]

The perfect is usually marked by the auxiliary have with a following past partici­
ple, as in [i]. The passive is a non-canonical clause construction (introduced in Ch. 2,
§7.5). The most central type is illustrated in [iia], which corresponds to the active
clause Only two airlines jly the Brussels-Dallas route. The bracketed sequence in
[iib] is a subordinate passive clause with no subject and without the auxiliary verb
be that appears in [iia].
The 'participle' component of the name is based on the use of the fonn in con­
structions like [5iib], which is comparable to [4iia] above. Flown in [5iib] is the
head of a subordinate clause modifying the noun route, which makes it functionally
similar to an adjective, such as unpopular in A [very unpopular] route is bound to
be expensive. There is, however, nothing adjective-like about the use ofjlown in the
perfect [i], or indeed in the central passive construction [iia].
The 'past' component of the name, on the other hand, derives from its use in the
perfect construction. The perfect is a kind of past tense, and in [5i], for example, the
flying is located in past time. But there is no past time meaning associated with
flown in passive clauses like those in [5ii].

1.2 Verb-fonns and shape sharing

We have seen that different inflectional fonns of a verb may share the

same shape. In our example paradigm for walk given in [2], this applies to the

preterite and the past participle (both walked) and to the plain present and the plain

fonn (both walk). We look further at these two major cases of shape sharing in this

section; there are also certain minor cases that will be left to Ch. 16, where we pres­

ent a systematic description of English inflectional morphology.

(a) Shape sharing between preterite and past participle

Walk is an example of a regular verb, i.e. one whose inflectional forms are all

predictable by general rule. An irregular verb, by contrast, is one where the shape