Preterite-Present verbs

They occupy a specific place within the verbal system of Old English verbs. They combine the qualities of the strong verbs as well as the weak ones. There are seven groups of classes here.

Middle English. All types of verbs existing in Old English – strong, weak, preterite-present and irregular were preserved in Middle English. In each type we find changes due to phonetic developments of this period, but the proportional value of the weak ones is greater and continue to grow.

The changes in strong verbs are as follows:

The number of the basic forms of the verb remained the same, but due to the reduction of the endings and the fact that the length of the vowel became positional the form of the present participle of some verbs coincided with the form of the past plural, that is that here too we may find homonymy of forms:

Class I written – wrot –writen – written

Class II chesen – ches –chosen – chosen

Class III drinken – drank – drunken – drunken

Class IV beren – bar – beren/bar – boren

Class V geten – gat – geten/gat –geten

Class VI shaken – shok – shoken – shaken

Class VII knowen – knew – knewen – knowen

Weak verbs

The number of weak verbs grows significantly in Middle English, because practically all borrowed verbs and new verbs derived from other parts of speech become weak. The changes in the weak verbs were mainly phonetical. Some of them lost the sound –i- in the suffix in the infinitive: lufian – louen.

Class II lost its specific –ode ending due to the leveling of endings and turned into –ed.

Class III retained only the verbs seΖΖen, libben, habben – seien, liven, haven

Early New English. The traditional classification of strong and weak verbs gives way to division into regular and irregular, with a pronounced tendency within the classes of the strong verbs to turn into weak ones, regular or irregular, but nevertheless forming their past tense and Participle II by a dental suffix –d or –t. Somewhat apart are treated modal verbs, formerly preterite-present, that are stripped of their paradigmatic forms and are later referred to as defective.