X-Nico

English irregular verbs

Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules describes how mistakes made by children in learning irregular verbs throw light on the mental processes involved in language acquisition.

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There are also a few anomalous cases: the verbs be and go, which demonstrate suppletion; the verb do; and the defective modal verbs.

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The modal verbs, which are defective verbs – they have only a present indicative form and (in some cases) a preterite, lacking nonfinite forms (infinitives, participles, gerunds), imperatives, and subjunctives (although some uses of the preterites are sometimes identified as subjunctives).

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Apart from the modal verbs, which are irregular in that they do not take an -s in the third person (see above), the only verbs with irregular present tense forms are be, do, have and say (and prefixed forms of these, such as undo and gainsay, which conjugate in the same way as the basic forms).

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There are a few exceptions: the verb be has irregular forms throughout the present tense; the verbs have, do and say have irregular -es forms; and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection.

see also