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The English language has a large number of irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called ''preterite'') or the past participle. The other inflected parts of the verb—the third person singular present indicative in ''-()s'', and the present participle and gerund form in ''-ing''—are formed regularly in most cases. There are a few exceptions: the verb ''be'' has irregular forms throughout the present tense; the verbs ''have'', ''do'' and ''say'' have irregular ''-()s'' forms; and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection. The irregular verbs include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs, such as ''to facebook'') usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as ''housesit'', from ''sit''). Irregular verbs in Modern English typically derive from verbs that followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of the language. In particular, many such verbs derive from Germanic strong verbs, which make many of their inflected forms through vowel gradation, as can be observed in Modern English patterns such as ''sing–sang–sung''. The regular verbs, on the other hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in ''-ed'', follow the weak conjugation, which originally involved adding a dental consonant (''-t'' or ''-d''). Nonetheless, there are also many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation. For information on the conjugation of regular verbs in English, as well as other points concerning verb usage, see English verbs. ==Development== Most English irregular verbs are native, derived from verbs that existed in Old English. Nearly all verbs that have been borrowed into the language at a later stage have defaulted to the regular conjugation. There are a few exceptions, however, such as the verb ''catch'' (derived from Old Northern French ''cachier''), whose irregular forms originated by way of analogy with native verbs such as ''teach''. Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. When some grammatical rule became changed or disused, some verbs kept to the old pattern. For example, before the Great Vowel Shift, the verb ''keep'' (then pronounced "kehp") belonged to a group of verbs whose vowel was shortened in the past tense; this pattern is preserved in the modern past tense ''kept'' (similarly ''crept'', ''wept'', ''leapt'', ''left''). Verbs such as ''peep'', which have similar form but arose after the Vowel Shift, take the regular ''-ed'' ending. The force of analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time, as irregular verbs switch to regular conjugation patterns (for instance, the verb ''chide'' once had the irregular past tense ''chid'', but this has given way to the regular formation ''chided''). This is more likely to occur with less common verbs (where the irregular forms are less familiar); hence it is often the more common verbs (such as ''be'', ''have'', ''take'') that tend to remain irregular. Many verbs today have coexisting irregular and regular forms (as with ''spelt'' and ''spelled'', ''dreamt'' and ''dreamed'', etc.), a sign that the irregular form might be on the wane. In a few cases, however, analogy has operated in the other direction (a verb's irregular forms arose by analogy with existing irregular verbs). This is the case with the example of ''catch'' given above; others include ''wear'' and ''string'', which were originally weak verbs, but came to be conjugated like the similar sounding strong verbs ''bear'' and ''swing''. The verb forms described in this article are chiefly those that are accepted in standard English; many regional dialects have different irregular forms. In particular, it is fairly common in some types of non-standard speech to use (standard) past tenses as past participles, and vice versa. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「English irregular verbs」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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