Principal parts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the grammar term. For the mathematical meaning, see Principal part.
In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms.
In English, the verb love derives all its forms systematically (love, loves, loved, loving), and since these can all be deduced from the basic form (the citation or dictionary form, which in English is the infinitive), no other principal parts have to be learned. With the verb sing, on the other hand, the forms sang and sung cannot be deduced, so the learner of English must memorise three principal parts, sing – sang – sung. From these, all other forms (like sings or singing) can be deduced. (See also English verbs, English irregular verbs, English as an additional language.)
In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts. The verb for "to carry" has the parts fero – ferre – tuli – latum. Fero is the first person singular form of the present ("I carry"), but the infinitive ferre ("to carry") is also needed to deduce all the forms of the present stem. The perfect stem tuli ("I carried") and the supine stem latum (required for the perfect passive) are quite irregular in this case, but even with many verbs which are basically regular, they have to be learned in the same way.
In Spanish, verbs are traditionally held to have only one principal part, the infinitive, by which one can classify the verb into one of three conjugation paradigms (according to the ending of the infinitive, which may be -ar, -er or -ir). However, some scholars believe that the conjugation could be regularized by adding another principal part to vowel-alternating verbs, which shows the alternation. For example, herir "to hurt" is usually considered irregular because its conjugation contains forms like hiero "I hurt", hieres "you hurt", where the vowel in the root changes into a diphthong. However, by including the first person singular, present tense, indicative mood form (hiero) as a principal part, and noting that the diphthong appears only when that syllable is stressed, the conjugation of herir becomes completely predictable. (See also Spanish verbs, Spanish conjugation.)
In Scottish Gaelic there are two principle parts for the regular verb: pog – pogadh. All finite forms can be deduced from the imperative pog ('kiss!'), all non-finite forms from the verbal noun pogadh ('kissing'). The ten irregular verbs can, with only two or three small aberrations (unexpected lenition), be deduced from four principal parts.
