Reference and peer-reviewed linguistic sources confirm that English modal auxiliary verbs lack standard inflectional forms like participles and third-person singular endings, characterizing them as morphologically defective.
certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection. Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the
As a Germanic language, the English language has many irregular verbs, overwhelmingly of Germanic origin, except for some words such as catch, 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 p
As a Germanic language, the English language has many irregular verbs, overwhelmingly of Germanic origin, except for some words such as catch, 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 -[e]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 -[e]s forms; and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection.
Irregular verbs in Modern English 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) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit, from sit).
Irregular verbs typically followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of English. 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.
The…
Abstract Epistemic deontic Be (as in Keats was to die young and in This door is to remain closed all day ) only occurs in finite positions, even though the verb Be is not morphologically defective and has an infinitive, an -Ing form and a participle. This brings out the insufficiency of McCawley's (1971) argument that English modals occur only as finites because of their defective morphology. It is demonstrated that epistemic deontic Be cannot be accommdated in the rule system by means of which Akmajlan, Steele and Wasow (1979) stipulate the positions of English auxiliary verbs. Hence this system must be modified. It is argued in the light of the theory on tense in Rigter that, contrary to Akmajian et al's proposal, modals are auxiliary verbs and belong to the same position class as epistemic deontic Be . The syntactic stipulation in Akmajian (1977) and in Akmajian et al (1979) that complements of perception verbs contain neither a perfect nor a modal is shown to be semantically motivated. Evidence is adduced that the progressive does occur in structures underlying perception verb complements. It is suggested that the distribution of semantic material over stacked structures is subject to a semantico-syntactic ordering principle which places the more objective predications in the scope of the more subjective predications.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/APULTP.2020.40.140-155 This article contains systematic and detailed analysis of morphological and semantic parameters of Germanic preterite-present verbs, dividing them into major and minor subgroups. The development of both preterite-present subgroups and their steady transformation into the modal verbs is a specific feature of all Germanic languages. Since the modal verbs of the Modern Germanic languages are morphologically defective, it is commonly assumed that preterite-present verbs of the old Germanic languages lost some of their morphological features in the process of turning into modal verbs. The semantic aspects of this process are rather obscure. All Germanic languages were losing some preterite-present verbs in the process of transformation from the Gothic language, which had fourteen preterite-present verbs. In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them survived in NE. The morphological description focuses on the finite and non-finite forms of the preterite-present verbs, which belong to the minor subgroup. The detailed description helps to see the origin and development of the minor subgroup in the new light. The description encompasses the data of classical Indo-European languages and Old Germanic languages. The authors emphasize the expediency of turning to the theory of preterite/strong verb origin, the verbs in question may be regarded as inter-group, hybrid units. In order to gain insight into the origin of the
Appendix:English modal verbs in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
The central English modal auxiliary verbs are can
In German: mögen, müssen, können, sollen, wollen; cognates of may, must, can, shall, and will. Although German shares five modal verbs with English, their meanings are often quite different. Mögen does not mean "be allowed" but "may" as epistemic modal and "like" as a normal verb followed by a noun phrase. It can be followed by an infinitive with the meaning of "have a…
expedient in view of the fact that morphologically signalled modal expressions are semantically very similar … English except be differ morphologically from lexical verbs in being defective, and semantically from most … lexical verbs, and where auxiliaries are morphologically not very defective, the distinction is even more difficult
Everything we examined (5) — 4 independent sources
This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.