Questioning the Terms: “Regular and Irregular Verbs” in English

Abstract

English verbs have unique inflectional markers which show the past tense. There are two inflectional markers that become the categorization of these verbs. The first marker is the additional morpheme [d] or [ed]. All verbs with this marker are categorized as regular verbs. The second marker is the verb morphophonemic change like the word ‘sing’ [+present] and ‘sang’ [+past]. The verbs of this kind are categorized as irregular’ verbs. Simply, the regular verbs are those whose changes can be morphophonemically predicted while irregular verbs are the ones whose changes are morphophonemically unpredictable. This research is aimed to figure out whether there are morphophonemic inflectional patterns for irregular verbs. This paper is descriptive qualitative research. The data were collected using observation with note taking technique. I analyzed the data using distributional method. The result of the analysis shows that there are four additional sounds added to the ’regular’ verbs such as [d], [t], [ɪd], and [əd]. I also found that the morphophonemic changes in the irregular verbs are influenced by the syllable number, the positions, and the environments of the peak sounds. These findings prove that the term “irregular and regular” is not fully appropriate to classify the verbs.

Assessing Students’ Ability About 16 Active Voice Tenses Using Quizizz Application

“…Verbs in English are divided into two: regular verbs and irregular verbs (Arief, 2016) The Free Dictionary explained that a regular verb is a verb that has both past form and past participle form constructed by adding the suffix "d" or "ed" at the end of the word. While irregular verb is defined as a verb that does not have spelling rules that can be followed to create the past form and the participle form.…”

Students’ Problems In Pronouncing -Ed Endings In Reading Aloud At Universitas Pgri Sumatera Barat

“…Most of the students have difficulties in pronouncing the -ed ending of regular verbs in the simple past tense. The students do not know that the -ed ending have rules to pronounce it, like Bowler and Cunningham in (Simanullang & Situmeang, 2018) (Arief, 2017), Salaberry in (Davila, 2018), (Giantari et al, 2020), the -ed ending word is the word that end in -ed or -d which is added to a regular verb to form the regular past tense and the regular past principle inflection. Therefore Brown & Attardo in (Zilva, 2017), Celce Murcia et al in (Jiménez et al, 2020),and Finegan in (Yaowaratana & Rungruang, 2018) explain that -ed ending have some rules as follows: First, if there is a verb which ends in /d/ or /t/, the ending takes an epenthetic vowel and is pronounced as /Id/.…”