Regular verbs follow standard rules for conjugation in different tenses, while irregular verbs do not. In English, regular verbs are identified by their past perfect and past participle forms. Regular verbs add -ed to the present tense to form the past tense and past participle. Irregular verbs must be learned through conversational usage or a dictionary. Some regular verbs can be irregular when they have multiple meanings, and some irregular verbs share spellings with regular verbs but have different meanings.
A regular verb conforms to a standard set of rules or conventions for conjugation in various tenses. In grammar, conjugation is the change of the base form of a verb to represent different inflections, especially regarding tense. Most languages have recognized rules for conjugating verbs, and some languages may have more than one such set, such as French, which has three separate forms of regular verbs, each with its own set of conjugation conventions. By simply identifying a verb as a regular verb, much can be deduced about the constructions of the various forms of the verb, if one knows the rules for those constructions in a particular language.
In English, the conjugations that determine whether a verb is a regular verb or an irregular verb are the past perfect and the past participle. The reason for this is that conjugations for other tenses, such as the present participle or third person present generally do not change, even in irregular verbs, with very few exceptions, such as the verb “to be”. In other languages this may or may not be the case.
For a typical regular verb in English, conjugating the past tense or past participle is done by adding the letters -ed to the present tense, or if the present form ends in the letter -e, by simply adding -d to the end of the word. For example, “talk” becomes “spoken” and “joke” becomes “joked”. Other tenses such as present, past, and future perfect also use the past participle form. The third person plural form of the present is the same as the base form, the third person singular form is created by simply adding -s to the base form, and the present participle is created by adding -ing to the base form. Using the previous example, “talking” is conjugated in these tenses as “talking”, “talking” and “talking”.
Conversely, an irregular verb will not follow these rules. Most irregular verbs are learned by native speakers of a language through conversational usage and at a fairly young age as language skills develop. Sometimes though, and especially when learning a second language, you need a dictionary to find the conjugations of irregular verbs. Most English language dictionaries do not list conjugations for regular verbs but will list those for irregular verbs.
Occasionally, a regular verb can also be irregular when it has two different meanings. For example, the verb “to hang” can be conjugated in two ways, depending on its use. One of the forms uses a regular conjugation and the other an irregular conjugation. In some cases, certain spellings may be used in conjugations of more than one verb, but for different tenses. For example, the verb “to ground” is a regular verb, but the verb “to grind”, an irregular verb, uses “ground” in the past tense, but with a different meaning.
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