Language Facts & Figures: All About Verbs

Welcome to our latest roundup of facts, figures, and wild hunches in response to some of the questions we've received about the English language. (Previous installments appear in our Grammar & Composition Forum.) This month, we turn our attention to verbs.

• What's the difference between a "weak verb" and a "strong verb"?
  
  Weak verbs (also called "regular verbs") form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the present tense (for example, call, called and walk, walked). Strong verbs (also called "irregular verbs") form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form (for example, give, gave and stick, stuck).
  
  In Garner's Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2003), Bryan Garner offers this explanation for the modifiers "strong" and "weak":

  Irregular verbs are sometimes called "strong" verbs because they seem to form the past tense from their own resources, without calling an ending to their assistance. The regular verbs are sometimes called "weak" verbs because they cannot form the past tense without the aid of the ending (most often -ed).

  In fact, the term "strong" has been inherited from Old English grammars, and many of today's irregular forms are descendants of common Old English verbs. Although fewer than 200 modern English verbs are "strong," these irregulars (most of which are just one syllable in length) are among the most common in the language. For more information, see our page on Irregular Verbs.


• Are there any examples of English verbs that are both regular (weak) and irregular (strong)?
  
  One that comes to mind at this time of year is the verb "to fly." In most cases, "fly" is an irregular verb: fly, flew, flown. But in the jargon of baseball, "fly" is a regular verb: fly, flied, flied. So we say that "David Ortiz flied out to center to end the inning." If Ortiz ever "flew out to center," we'd have quite a different story.


• What are the most common verbs in English?
  
  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, these are the 25 most commonly used verbs in English: 1. be; 2. have; 3. do; 4. say; 5. get; 6. make; 7. go; 8. know; 9. take; 10. see; 11. come; 12. think; 13. look; 14. want; 15. give; 16. use; 17. find; 18. tell; 19. ask; 20. work; 21. seem; 22. feel; 23. try; 24. leave; 25. call. The editors at the OED offer these observations:

  Strikingly, the 25 most frequent verbs are all one-syllable words; the first two-syllable verbs are become (26th) and include (27th). Furthermore, 20 of these 25 are Old English words, and three more, get, seem, and want, entered English from Old Norse in the early medieval period. Only try and use came from Old French. It seems that English prefers terse, ancient words to describe actions or occurrences.

• What is the difference between the present progressive and the present participle?
  

  A present participle is a verb form with an "-ing" ending (for example, "tapping"). The present progressive tense is a form of the verb "to be" plus a present participle (for example, "is tapping").

  Here is how each one is used:

  A present participle by itself can't stand as the main verb of a sentence. This word group, for instance, is incomplete: "Sadie, tapping her cane to the music." Here, "tapping" begins a present participial phrase that modifies the noun "Sadie." One way to make this word group into a sentence is by adding a subject and a predicate: "I remember Sadie, tapping her cane to the music."
  
  In contrast, a verb in the present progressive tense may itself serve as the predicate of a sentence: "Sadie is tapping her cane to the music." The present progressive is used for ongoing actions--that is, for actions occurring at the moment of speaking and for actions that take place over a short period of time.

  So we could have a sentence that contains both a present participial phrase ("tapping her cane to the music") and a main verb in the present progressive tense ("is singing"):

  "Tapping her cane to the music, Sadie is singing loudly and out of key."

  In this sentence, "tapping" is a present participle (unaccompanied by a form of the verb "to be") and "is singing" (present participle plus a form of the verb "to be") is the main verb in the present progressive tense.



More About Verbs at Grammar & Composition:

• Irregular Verbs
• Using Correct Forms of the Verb "Be"
• Principal Parts of Irregular Verbs

Are there any questions? If so, please send them our way by clicking on the "comments" button below. And please visit our Grammar & Composition Forum for past editions of Language Facts & Figures.