Eugene J. Hall said that there are only two tenses in English which are marked by inflection. These are the simple present and simple past
tenses.
41
Most modern grammarians also consider that there are only two tenses in English which have inflected endings; the simple present and the
simple past. In this study, the writer will focus on the verbs inflection in the simple past tense. The simple past tense indicates past actions that
occur at a definite time in the past, whether the time is stated or not.
According to their changes of form inflection verbs are divided into regular and irregular verbs.
42
a. Regular Verb
Most English verbs are regular in the form of the past and the past participle. According to
Silvia Robertson
, regular verbs are verbs which conform to a certain pattern.
S
he also
said that the regular verbs have certain patterns to change such the word walk that changes into walk-walked-walked, but
to be cannot change regularly as the word walk.
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The simple past and past participle of regular verbs is –ed, such as
clean –cleaned, live–lived, paint–painted, etc. For example:
Simple past: I cleaned my room yesterday.
Past participle: Present perfect : havehas + past participle
For example: Candy has lived in Miami for ten years.
Passive : be + past participle For example:
These rooms are cleaned every day.
44
41
Eugene J. Hall. Grammar for Use. New York: Voluntad Publishers, Inc, 1992, p. 153
42
James C. Fernald, op.cit p. 82
43
Hodder Stoughton, op. cit p. 4
44
Raymond Murphy with William R. Smalzer, Basic Grammar in Use second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 50
With regular verbs we can also predict that the past tense form and past participle forms are identical and formed with the
–ed ending added to the base:
Table 2.6 The example of regular verb
The base past form
past participle Walk
walked walked
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b. Irregular Verb
Irregular verbs is a small number of verbs, among the some of the most commonly used verbs in the language, which have forms that differ
from the regular tense form.
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Irregular verbs form the past tense and the past participle which are different with the regular verbs that adding
–ed. Actually, there are only about 200 irregular verbs, including all the
auxiliaries, in the English language.
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Besides, regular and irregular verbs are different in the number of verbs, irregular verbs also different in the way to make it. Different with
regular verbs, however, in the irregular verbs we cannot predict their past
and past participle forms from the base. For example:
Table 2.7 The example of irregular verbs
The base past form
past participle Break
Broke Broken
45
Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svantvik, A Communicative Grammar of English Third Edition, Boston: Pearson Education, 2002, p.300
46
Marcella Fank. Modern English: a Practical Reference Guide. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, INC, 1972, p. 61
47
James C. Fernald. Op. cit., p. 82
Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svantvik
said that there are three main types of irregular verbs divided as in the bellow:
1 Verbs in which all the three principal part the base, the past form,
the past participle are identical, for example: Cut ~ cut ~ cut
let ~ let ~ let 2
Verbs in which two parts are identical, for example: Spend ~ spent ~ spent
come ~ came ~ come 3
Verbs in which all three parts are different, for example: Blow ~ blew ~ blown
speak ~ spoke ~ spoken
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3. Forms of Verb
Verbs indicate the time of an action by their form. The form tells whether the action is in the past, the present, or the future. The English
language has six tenses to indicate three of them, and all of the tenses are based on the four principal parts of verb. As follows:
Table 2.8 The four principal parts of verb
Present Past
Past participle Present participle
Walk Walked
have walked is walking
a. Regular Verb
There are two types of main verbs, they are regular and irregular. „Regular’ means that we can state all the verb forms of an English verb
once we know its base form. The base is the basic, uninflected form which is given as the entry from in dictionaries. A regular English verb, such as
call, has the following four forms:
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Leech and Jan Svantvik, op. cit., p.300
