We have been taught in school that English language has different “tense” forms. To help you quickly recollect, I am listing them in the table below (the verb ‘sleep’ is used as example):
No. |
Tense Form |
Example Sentence (3rd Person Singular Pronoun) |
1 | Simple Present | She sleeps |
2 | Simple Past | She slept |
3 | Simple Future | She will sleep |
4 | Present Continuous | She is sleeping |
5 | Past Continuous | She was sleeping |
6 | Future Continuous | She will be sleeping |
7 | Present Perfect | She has slept |
8 | Past Perfect | She had slept |
9 | Future Perfect | She will have slept |
10 | Present Perfect Continuous | She has been sleeping |
11 | Past Perfect Continuous | She had been sleeping |
12 | Future Perfect Continuous | She will have been sleeping |
13 | Conditional Simple | She would sleep |
14 | Conditional Perfect | She would have slept |
15 | Conditional Continuous | She would be sleeping |
16 | Conditional Perfect Continuous | She would have been sleeping |
The above table gives examples for the verb “sleep” as applied to “3rd Person Singular” pronoun. When we “conjugate” a verb, we change its form so that it matches the required Tense, Person and Number. Take the verb “sleep” used in the table above.
Case 1:
Tense = Present Continuous
Person = First Person
Number = Singular
The conjugation of “sleep” gives “am sleeping”.
Case 2:
Tense = Present Continuous
Person = First Person
Number = Plural
The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.
Case 3:
Tense = Present Continuous
Person = Second Person
Number = Singular/Plural
The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.
Case 4:
Tense = Present Continuous
Person = Third Person
Number = Singular
The conjugation of “sleep” gives “is sleeping”.
Case 5:
Tense = Present Continuous
Person = Third Person
Number = Plural
The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.
I hope you get the idea. For more details, go through a good book on English grammar.
One of the interesting features I have built into my “iLexicon” system is the automatic generation of verb forms depending on the <Verb, Tense, Person, Number > quadruple. In today’s article, I would like to show examples of this functionality.
Have a look at the following session:
Here “p1”, “p2” and “p3” stand for 1st Person, 2nd Person and 3rd Person respectively. The term “c1” denotes “singular” number. The last argument of the predicate will be bound to the conjugated (generated) form of the verb.
It will be convenient if we can generate the conjugated forms of a verb for all the 16 tenses listed in the earlier table. Here is the code fragment (written in Sicstus Prolog) that does this:
Let us apply this to:
Verb = sleep
Person = 3rd Person
Number = Singular
Tense = All the 16 tenses
Here is what we get:
For our next example, let us consider:
Verb = eat
Person = 3rd Person
Number = Plural
Tense = All the 16 tenses
Here is the corresponding output:
For the third and final example,
Verb = sing
Person = 1st Person
Number = Singular
Tense = All the 16 tenses
And here is the output generated by the system:
As you can see, “iLexicon” is capable of conjugating verbs correctly. This is really important when we are interested in generating complete sentences, and that is one of the larger goals of this project.
Watch this space for many more interesting aspects of “iLexicon”. And have a nice weekend!
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