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Re: # of possible verb declensions (was gotten, boughten)

From:JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 26, 2002, 19:01
taliesin the storyteller sikyal:

> As a non-native speaker, let me assure you: English verbs are just about > the worst bit.
I'm a native speaker and so I can hardly tell you what "should" be hard about my language, but . . . . It seems to me that any way of looking at the verbs that makes you aware of the number of differrent constructions is very backwards. When I think of the forms of "go" I think of five wordforms: go, goes, went, going, gone. Everything else is combining one of these five forms with another verb, the patterns for which are very simple. There are really only five patterns: modal + root verb + infinitive have + past participle be + present participle be + past participle Combine in the above order any way you like, and you'll have a grammatical sentence: "It would have to have been being broken" uses all five. Remembering what the various verbal paraphrases *mean* is a different thing, but that's a lexical problem, not a syntactic one. Any language will have an equivalent problem. So how hard can it be to remember five forms and five rules? I back myself up: learning Romanian and Spanish, it never occurred to me to consider periphrastic form "voy a decir" part of the cojugation of "decir." I barely even consider "he dicho" part of the conjugation. (Likewise for the Romanian "o sa zic" and "am zis.") Why should learning English be any different? Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/ "If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." --G.K. Chesterton

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>