1948: Irregulars that Don't Change Apr 15, 2020

English verb tenses have lots of different patterns, often without discernible rules. Some, like 'ring' change internally for tense ('rang') and aspect ('rung'). Others, however, like 'put', 'shut', 'wed' and many more don't change at all, whether by interval vowel change or by a suffix, like '-ed'. This means "they put the book on the table" is ambiguous. These are irregular, and in many syntactic models to map English grammar, these ('put' and 'put', that is) are treated as grammatically different.

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