A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

(^34) Chapter 3 Verbs, tense, aspect, and mood
of at least one inflectional form has to be specified for that particular verb. Show,
for example, has an irregular past participle: a dictionary needs to tell us that it has
the shape shown. And for fly , both preterite (flew) and past participle (flown) are
irregular.
All regular verbs have identical shapes for the preterite and the past participle,
and so indeed do most of the 200 or so irregular verbs. Nevertheless, there are a
good number like fly which have distinct shapes.
We can set out the paradigms for walk andfly in chart form, with lines indicating
distinctions in shape (the order of presenting the forms is chosen purely to make it
easy to represent where shape-sharing occurs):
[6] Regular verbs like walk Irregular verbs like fly
PRIMARY SECONDARY PRIMARY SECONDARY
3rd sing present gerund-participle 3rd sing present gerund-participle
walks walking flies flying
plain present plain form plain present plain form
walk fly
walked flew flown
preterite past participle preterite past participle
When preterite and past participle share the same shape, we can tell which one
we have in any given sentence by a substitution test: we select a verb in which
preterite and past participle are distinct and substitute it in the example to see which
shape is required. The following examples will illustrate the idea:
a.
11 a.
[8] a.
ii a.
EXAMPLES WITH walk
She usually walked there.
It would be better if we
walked more.
She has walked a lot.
We were walked to
the door.
fly SUBSTITUTED FOR walk
b. She usually flew there.
)
b. It would be better ifwe [preterite]
flew more.
b. She has flown a lot.
)
b. We were flown to [past participle]
New Yo rk.
We can see that the walked of [7] is a preterite form, because the experiment of
substituting fly in these constructions requires flew. Flown would be quite
impossible here: She usually flown there and It would be better if we flown
more. Notice that in [ii] we have again chosen a construction where the preterite
does not indicate past time. You can't decide whether a form is preterite or
not by asking whether it refers to past time: the matter has to be determined
grammatically.