The perfect, as these sentences illustrate, consists of a tensed form of the
verbhaveand a verb that has-edor-enattached (the-edand-ensuffixes are
calledpast participlemarkers), as indicated below:
have(marked for tense)verb + ed/enTeaching Tip
The past participle in English is irregular owing to the influence of other lan-
guages over the centuries. Some verbs take the -ed suffix, some the -en suffix,
as just illustrated. The verb “do” takes neither, instead ending in -ne, as in “She
had doneher homework.” Students are easily confused by explanations of the
past participle, with good reason. Adding to the problem is that many dialects
of American English use the participial form of the verb as the simple past, as
in “?I seen her before.” Spending significant amounts of time on the grammati-
cal explanation seems to have little effect on students’ language patterns.
Working with contrastive pairs offers a more useful approach:- ?I been working on the paper.
- I have been working on the paper.
Teachers can use students’ own writing or can record and then transcribe stu-
dents’ speech to develop contrastive pairs, which gives a sense of authentic-
ity that is conducive to better learning.
Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
There are several different kinds of verbs. Although we cannot examine all of
them, we can look at some of the more important categories. Sentence 1—Dogs
bark—has just a subject and a verb. Sentence 4—Fritz hit the ball—has a sub-
ject, a verb, and an object. The difference is related to the fact thatbarkandhit
are different kinds of verbs.
Some verbs either require or can work with an object;hitis such a verb. We
call these verbstransitive verbs.Other verbs, such asbark,cannot work with an
object. If we put a noun phrase afterbark,we have an ungrammatical sentence.
Verbs that cannot be followed by a noun phrase are calledintransitive verbs.
This distinction is straightforward and does not normally cause students any
confusion, but many verbs can function both transitively and intransitively,
which can be very confusing. Consider the following:
- Fred ate an apple.
- Fred ate.
- Macarena stopped the car.
- Macarena stopped.
- Fritz cooked the dinner.
72 CHAPTER 3