13. Verbs

The English verb has at most five forms (walk, walks, walked, walked, walking; sing, sings, sang, sung, singing), eight for be, and only one or two for the modals. Everything else (future, perfect, progressive, passive, most of the subjunctive) is expressed with auxiliaries. This chapter gives the forms and their spelling and sound (§§1–3), the paradigms of be, have, do (§4), the modals and semi-modals (§§5–6), the periphrastic forms and the features UD gives them (§7), the non-finite forms (§8), negation and contraction (§9), and how Mova lemmatizes, tags and tokenizes verbs (§10). The irregular verbs have their own chapter (14. Irregular verbs).

1. The five forms

Sweet NEG I §1290 describes the regular verb by its three endings -s, -ed, -ing and notes that the base serves as present, subjunctive, imperative and infinitive. In UD English EWT + ESLSpok train (en/data/forms.tsv, counted 2026-10-17) the verb tags have these shares of all tokens: VB 4.6%, VBD 2.6%, VBP 2.6%, VBZ 2.2%, VBN 1.9%, VBG 1.6%, MD 1.6%.

Reynolds 2026 (§5.4, and ch. 5 generally) uses the CGEL names: plain form, 3rd singular present, preterite, past participle, gerund-participle. He counts two tenses (present and preterite) and treats the perfect and progressive as aspects formed with auxiliaries (§§5.5–5.8).

2. The regular inflections

2.1 The -s form

Irregular -s forms: is (be), has (have), does /dʌz/ (do), says /sez/ (say; vowel change in speech only). The modals have none (he can, not *cans), and need and dare lose it when used as modals (he need not go) (Sweet NEG I §§1290, 1293, 1478, 1487, 1492–1493; Whitney §243; seed Verb in -s: 3rd person singular present (VBZ)).

The third person singular is the only person ending left in the present. Non-standard and dialectal varieties regularize it in either direction: zero -s (he go, East Anglia, African American English) or -s throughout (I goes, they says: the Northern Subject Rule and South-West England) (08 §12; Hejná & Walkden 2022 §2.3.1).

2.2 The past and past participle -ed

Exceptions in spelling: laid, paid, said (not *layed); in sound: -ed adjectives with /ɪd/ (aged, learned, blessed; 04 §6.2). All new verbs are regular: googled, texted, emailed, friended, zoomed (Sweet NEG I §§1286–1287 already: "all new verbs are regular"). Spelling details: 06 §§2–5; seed Regular past in -ed and forms in -t.

2.3 The -ing form

3. Irregular verbs in brief

About 150 simple verbs (and many more prefixed and compound ones: understand, overcome, forgive) have irregular past or participle forms: sing–sang–sung, go–went–gone, put–put–put, keep–kept–kept, bring–brought–brought. They are among the most frequent verbs. Classes, the full table and variants are in 14. Irregular verbs.

4. Be, have, do

These three are both lexical verbs and auxiliaries. UD tags them AUX when they are auxiliaries (and be also as the copula), VERB otherwise (seed The copula is only be: only be is a copula in UD English).

4.1 Be

Be is the only verb with person agreement beyond the 3rd singular (am) and number agreement in the past (was/were). Sweet NEG I §§1488–1491 and Jespersen MEG VI 5.6 (three roots: be, is, was); seed The verb be: am, is, are, was, were, been, being. Non-standard you was, we was and it weren't level the past (08 §12).

Uses as auxiliary: progressive (is singing), passive (was sung), be to (you are to leave), be going to (§6), archaic perfect with verbs of motion (he is come).

4.2 Have

Forms: have, has, had, had, having; contracted 've, 's, 'd; negative haven't, hasn't, hadn't. Has and had are irregular only in spelling and sound: the stem loses /v/ (Sweet NEG I §1492; Jespersen MEG VI 4.1₄).

Uses:

• perfect auxiliary: she has gone, they had left, to have seen (UD AUX);
• possession and other lexical uses: I have a car (VERB). In questions and negatives, lexical have takes do-support in AmE and increasingly in BrE (Do you have a car? I don't have one); the older British pattern is Have you a car? I haven't a car, and the most common informal British form is have got (Have you got a car? I've got one). Have got is present in meaning (got here is not past);
• causative and experiential: have something done (I had my hair cut); have someone do something;
• obligation: have to, have got to (§6).

4.3 Do

Forms: do, does /dʌz/, did, done, doing; negative don't, doesn't, didn't. Uses:

• do-support: the dummy auxiliary in questions, negatives, emphasis and ellipsis when no other auxiliary is present: Do you know? I don't know. I DO know. – Yes, I do. (seed Do-support: do + infinitive). Hejná & Walkden 2022 §4.4.1 trace its rise in Early Modern English (09 §3.5);
• lexical do: do homework, do the dishes (VERB); it needs do-support itself: Did you do it?;
• pro-verb: She sings better than I do.

Non-standard he don't (for doesn't) is old and widespread in speech.

5. Modal auxiliaries

5.1 The central modals

Morphological properties of the modals (Sweet NEG I §§1477–1487; Jespersen MEG VI 3.8–3.9; Reynolds 2026 §5.3):

• no -s in the 3rd person singular (she can, *cans);
• no infinitive, no participles, no -ing form: *to can, *canning, *has could; the gaps are filled by periphrases: be able to, be allowed to, have to (I'd like to be able to swim; she has had to leave);
• followed by the bare infinitive (can go, not *can to go; except ought to); seed After a modal — a bare infinitive;
• negation with not directly after them and inversion in questions without do (Can you? You can't.);
• the "past" forms could, might, should, would are past in time only in some uses (I could swim when I was five); mostly they express tentativeness or hypothesis (Could you help me? It might rain);
• historically, can, may, shall, must, ought, dare and the old wot are preterite-present verbs: old past forms with present meaning, which is why they lack the -s of the present (Sweet NEG I §§1477–1487).

UD tags them AUX with PTB MD and the single feature VerbForm=Fin (seed Modal verbs: can, may, must, shall, will…); EWT has MD 3 292 times in train (will 834 as MD).

5.2 Variation

• shall is rare in AmE except in offers and legal texts; in BrE it survives in first-person questions and formal future.
• need and dare are both modal (needn't, daren't) and lexical (doesn't need to, doesn't dare to); the lexical use is now dominant, the modal mostly British and formal (seed Need and dare: modal and lexical, after Poutsma 1923 §§6–31).
• Double modals (might could, may can) occur in the US South and in Scotland and northern England.
• ought to competes with should; negative and question forms (oughtn't, ought we to?) are formal.

6. Semi-modals and other periphrases

Verb combinations that behave like modals but inflect like lexical verbs:

Hejná & Walkden 2022 §3.4.2 traces the growth of the semi-modals (have to, be going to, want to, need to) in Late Modern and present-day English at the expense of the central modals; seed Have to, be going to, used to — not auxiliaries.

7. Periphrastic forms: tense, aspect, voice, mood

7.1 The system

The order of auxiliaries is fixed: modal – perfect have – progressive be – passive be – lexical verb, each auxiliary selecting the form of the next (modal → base; have → past participle; progressive be → -ing; passive be → past participle): It might have been being repaired. Reynolds 2026 §5.8 lays out the same system as two tenses times two aspects plus modality; the syntax chapters (chapters 20–38) treat their meanings.

The get-passive: get + past participle (he got fired), informal and often adversative; UD tags get as AUX with aux:pass in EWT (seed Get: passive auxiliary or lexical verb); Hejná & Walkden 2022 §2.4.2 describe its spread.

7.2 How UD annotates them

UD English does not mark tense or aspect on the whole construction; it annotates each word: the auxiliaries (AUX) carry their own finite features, the lexical verb its non-finite form. has been writing = has AUX VBZ Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin, been AUX VBN Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part, writing VERB VBG Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part. A meaning layer that reconstructs "present perfect progressive" from this chain is part of Mova's frames, not of en (docs/architecture.md).

7.3 Mood

• Indicative: the ordinary finite forms.
• Imperative: the base form, without a subject (Sit down!), negated with don't (Don't go!), emphatic do (Do sit down); let's for the 1st plural (Let's go; 's lemma us/we). UD Mood=Imp.
• Subjunctive: the present subjunctive is the base form in all persons, used in that-clauses after verbs and adjectives of demand, suggestion, necessity (the mandative subjunctive: I suggest that he see a doctor; It is essential that she be informed), more in AmE than BrE (which prefers should see), and in fixed phrases (God save the King, be that as it may, so be it, come what may, if need be). The past subjunctive were appears in unreal conditions and wishes: if I were you, I wish it were Friday, as if he were. UD Mood=Sub (seed Subjunctive mood; Hejná & Walkden 2022 §3.3.2 on the "subjunctive" in Late Modern English). The past tense of other verbs in unreal conditions (If I had a car…) is the ordinary past, used modally.

8. Non-finite forms

The infinitive marker to can stand alone when the verb is understood (I didn't want to), and it is not a preposition (To with the infinitive — a function particle (mark)); to before an -ing form is a preposition (I look forward to seeing you; to-before-ing.md).

9. Negation and contraction

9.1 Negative forms

Finite auxiliaries are negated by not, usually contracted to n't in speech and informal writing. Several stems change in contraction:

Hejná & Walkden 2022 §3.3.1 describe the history of negative contraction in Late Modern English. Contracted n't behaves as an inflection of the auxiliary: it inverts with it (Isn't it? Don't you know?), while full not stays after the subject (Is it not?).

9.2 Auxiliary contractions

The ambiguity of 's (is, has, us, genitive) and 'd (would, had) is resolved by what follows: he's gone (has + participle), he's going (is + -ing), he's tall (is), he'd gone (had + participle), he'd go (would + base) (seed Contracted forms: 's, 're, 'm, 've, 'd, 'll, n't).

9.3 Restrictions

• A contracted auxiliary cannot be stressed or stand at the end of a clause: Yes, I am (*Yes, I'm); I don't know where he is (*…where he's) (04 §2).
• Two contractions on one auxiliary are possible in speech (I'd've, wouldn't've), rare in writing.
• Double negatives (I didn't see nothing) are standard in many dialects and in older English, stigmatized in the written standard (seed no is a determiner, none is a pronoun; Double negation: don't know nothing).

10. How Mova handles verbs

• Tokenization (en/src/tok.rs): the clitics n't, 's, 're, 've, 'll, 'd, 'm (constant CLITICS) are split off by rule, also with the typographic apostrophe; the stem left behind keeps its form: do|n't, ca|n't, wo|n't, sha|n't, ai|n't. cannot is split can|not, as in EWT (a fix found by the absurdity matrix on 2026-10-02, when cannot help was read as a verb cannot with an object; comment in tok.rs).
• Lemmas of contracted forms come from the UD counts in the lexicon: ca → can (78 tokens in EWT + ESLSpok train), wo → will (48), 'll → will (149), 'm → be (197), 're → be (101), 've → have (123), 'd → would (42) or have (11), 's → be (329) or have (15) or genitive (550), n't → not (649), ai → be (4) (en/data/forms.tsv, counted 2026-10-17).
• Lemmatization and inflection (en/src/morph.rs): Morph::lemmatize(form, tag) first applies archaic (Early Modern forms: 09 §5), then the most frequent UD analysis of the form with that tag, then the AGID paradigm, then reverse suffix rules (unsuffix: -ied → -y, -ed, -d, undoubling; -ying → -ie, -ing, -ing + e, undoubling; -ies → -y, -es, -s). Morph::inflect(lemma, tag) goes the other way (UD, then AGID, then suffix); 06 §11 lists what the fallback rules do and do not cover (no consonant doubling for unknown verbs). Lemma accuracy on UD test sets is 99.3–99.5% (en — Mova's English graph compressor).
• The paradigm slot of a tag is Slot::of(tag): VBD → Past, VBN → PastPart, VBG → PresPart, VBZ → ThirdSg; VB and VBP share the base. The lexicon stores irregular pasts and participles separately, so put (VBD) and put (VBN) both lemmatize to put and went → go, gone → go (unit test dictionary).
• AUX vs VERB and the features (Mood, Tense, VerbForm, Person, Number) are assigned from the PTB tag and context by tables; the closed list of auxiliaries is in Auxiliary verbs — a closed list, and rules in perfect-have.md, progressive-be-ing.md, passive-aux.md, modal-bare-infinitive.md check the auxiliary chain.
• Not yet: gonna, wanna, gotta are not split by the tokenizer itself; amn't, ain't as general negatives are handled only as far as EWT shows them; tense–aspect meanings are not computed in en (they are read into frames later).

Sources for this chapter

• Sweet 1891, NEG I §§1286–1293 (regular verbs), §§1477–1493 (anomalous verbs: modals, be, have, do). archive.org/details/newenglishgramma01sweeuoft our card
• Jespersen 1942, MEG VI chapters II–V (personal endings, tense formation), 3.8–3.9 (modals without -s), 4.1–4.2, 5.6 (be). archive.org/details/modernenglishgra06jesp
• Whitney 1877, §§234–244. archive.org/details/essentialsofengl01whit our card
• Poutsma, H. 1921/1923. The Characters of the English Verb; The Infinitive, the Gerund and the Participles of the English Verb. Library books/p/po/poutsma-1921-characters-english-verb.
• Hejná & Walkden 2022, §2.3.1, §2.4.2 (get-passive), §3.3.1 (negative contraction), §3.3.2 (subjunctive), §3.4.2 (semi-modals), §4.4.1 (do-support). zenodo.org/records/6560337 our card
• Reynolds 2026, ch. 5 (§5.3 auxiliaries, §§5.5–5.8 tense and aspect). zenodo.org/records/20612113
• Universal Dependencies, English verbs and auxiliaries: universaldependencies.org/en/pos/AUX_.html ; features VerbForm, Mood, Tense: universaldependencies.org/u/feat
• Santorini 1990, PTB tagging guidelines (VB, VBD, VBG, VBN, VBP, VBZ, MD). repository.upenn.edu/cis reports/570
• Mova: en/src/tok.rs, en/src/morph.rs, en/data/forms.tsv, en — Mova's English graph compressor; seeds en/seeds/morph/verb-*.md, en/seeds/verbal/*.md.

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