B. Regular Verbs
What are Regular Verbs?
One way to categorize verbs is whether they follow certain rules or not: regular verbs (verbs that follow tense rules consistently with regard to spelling) and irregular verbs (verbs that don’t follow those rules). We will begin with an overview of the regular verb tenses.
Simple Tenses
Regular verbs follow the same patterns when shifting from the present to past tense or future tense. For example, to form a past-tense or past-participle verb form, add -ed or -d to the end of a verb. You can avoid mistakes by understanding this basic pattern.
Verb tense identifies the time of action described in a sentence. Verbs take different forms to indicate different tenses. Verb tenses indicate:
- an action or state of being in the present,
- an action or state of being in the past,
- an action or state of being in the future.
Helping verbs, such as be and have, also work to create verb tenses, such as the future tense.
Example 1
Present Tense: Tim walks to the store. (Singular subject)
Present Tense: Sue and Kimmy walk to the store. (Plural subject)
Past Tense: Yesterday, they walked to the store to buy some bread. (Singular subject)
Future Tense: I will walk to the store tomorrow. (Singular subject)
When he, she, or it is doing the present tense action, remember to add –s or –es to the end of the verb or to change the y to –ies.
When he, she, or it is doing the action in the past tense, remember to add –d or –ed to the end of regular verbs.
Simple future verbs are used when the action has not yet taken place:
Example 2
I will work late tomorrow.
I will kiss my boyfriend when I see him.
I will erase the board after class.
For the most part, we focus on the simple past, present, and future tenses here. However, the chart below lists all the tenses. Notice that the examples all use regular verbs and, depending on the tense, helping verbs as well.
Exercise 1: Complete the following sentences by selecting the correct form of the verb in simple present, simple past, or simple future tenses.
- The Dust Bowl (is, was, will be) a name given to a period of very destructive dust storms that occurred in the United States during the 1930s.
- Historians today (consider, considered, will consider) The Dust Bowl to be one of the worst weather of events in American history.
- The Dust Bowl mostly (affects, affected, will affect) the states of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.
- Dust storms (continue, continued, will continue) to occur in these dry regions, but not to the devastating degree of the 1930s.
- The dust storms during The Dust Bowl (cause, caused, will cause) irreparable damage to farms and the environment for a period of several years.
- When early settlers (move, moved, will move) into this area, they (remove, removed, will remove) the natural prairie grasses in order to plant crops and graze their cattle.
- They did not (realize, realized, will realize) that the grasses kept the soil in place.
- There