English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology

In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. The main form of the verb, called a lemma, is the form usually found in a dictionary. For English, the conjugation consists of the infinitive, the past tense, the present participle, the past participle, and the forms for the first, second and third person, both singular and plural.

Regular verbs in English are conjugated using the infinitive for all forms, except that the past and past participle end in "ed", the present participle ends in "ing", and the third person singular ends in "s".  Although the rules appear to be very simple, the morphology of regular English verbs is affected by phonetic and orthographic constraints.

Irregular verbs do not follow the standard patterns of conjugation. English has approximately 200 irregular verbs that are commonly used.

The following table shows the conjugarion for the verb "copy", which is a regular verb. Notice that the "y" changes to an "i" in some forms. Regular verbs retain the same root and alter only the ending, whereas irregular verbs may change the root completely. The past tense of the verb "go" is "went" and its past participle is "gone".

Inflectional Morphology is the process of listing the various forms of a noun, adjective or adverb. Nouns can have singular, plural, and possessive forms, such as "general", "generals", and "general's". Adjectives and adverbs display the positive, comparative, and superlative forms. The forms of some irregular adjectives can be completely different from the root, e.g., "good", "better", and "best", whereas the forms of regular adjectives just change the endings, e.g., "hot", "hotter", and "hottest".