Three-form verbs: the participle is a word of its own

The verbs in this topic change twice, so their past simple and their past participle are two different words. The questions give you a gap to complete, a form to type, a list of shapes to sort by the slot each one can serve, or three finished sentences to judge. All of them turn on a single decision — plain past or participle — and it is the grammar of the sentence, not its meaning, that announces which of the two is wanted.

Three shapes, one signal

Before you answer, say the whole set to yourself: base, past simple, past participle. Then look at the verb phrase. If it holds no auxiliary, the slot is the past simple, and an expression of finished time — last summer, in 2018, on Tuesday night — is usually standing nearby. If the phrase opens with have or has, the slot is the past participle, and it stays the participle when a negative or an adverb slips in between the two parts. The perfect meaning is carried by the auxiliary; the participle only completes it.

Eight verbs of this topic show the whole pattern.

Read the third column as the marked one. Within this group a participle either adds -n or -en to the base, sometimes reshaped, or it moves the vowel to u; the middle column does neither, carrying a plain vowel change and no ending. A form that is marked in one of those two ways is asking for an auxiliary, and a bare one is ready to stand alone. The first four rows show the tightest version of the pattern: in the i-family the vowel runs i — a — u, with a in the past simple and u in the participle.

Where the marks are lost

• A past simple parked after the auxiliary. This is the signature error of the group: has sang, have spoke, has chose, have began. The auxiliary has already announced a perfect, so the shape that closes the phrase has to be the participle.
• A participle set loose with no auxiliary. The mirror image of the same confusion: begun, drunk, swum or broken put where a plain past tense is needed. With no have or has in the phrase, a participle has nothing to attach itself to.
• The regular ending on a verb that reshapes itself. Swimmed, breaked, speaked, choosed and throwed all apply a rule this family refuses. A verb that already changes twice never also takes -ed.
• The base form left after the auxiliary. Sing and ring are offered in the participle slot, where they leave the perfect unfinished. An auxiliary needs a participle to complete it, and a base form completes nothing.
• A present-tense form among the past shapes. Throws is the form used with he, she and it in the present, and neither an auxiliary nor a past-time expression elsewhere in the sentence can turn it into a past shape.
• An old adjective that is no longer a verb form. Drunken survives only in front of a noun, as in a drunken argument. It fills neither past slot, however much it looks like a participle.

Try it