Conjugate? Parse? Principle parts? What do you call it?

[Janie]

What do you call it when you direct your student to list the principal parts of verbs in English?
Do you say "Conjugate these verbs" or "Parse these verbs" or simply "List the principal parts of these verbs"?

For example, for the verb "give," you say give, gave, given.

Others,
keep, kept, kept
think, thought, thought
do, did, done

Also, for some reason I can rattle off the principal parts of verbs very easily. I don't specifically remember learning to do this in grade school, but I must have. Do you remember being taught this?

[OhM]

I always say, "Tell me the principal parts."

And like you, I don't remember deliberately learning this, but I've used it all my life to find the proper past or present/past perfect tenses.

[abbeyej]

"Tell me the principle parts"

To Conjugate would be: I give, you give, he gives, we give, y'all give (okay, I just use that one to emphasize to kids that it's plural and we make the "y'all" really silly and drawn out), they give.

Or you could specify a tense other than present, and they could conjugate (as above) in the tense you give...

To parse would be to have them tell you what "gave" is in a sentence (person, number, tense, mood, voice -- or whichever of those things they know).

At least that's what it means in other languages. Like you, I don't remember ever doing this in English -- at least not till after I had done it in French or Latin.

[Robin in Tx]

Hi Janie!

R&S instructs the student to list the principal parts. Just as the others have said.

It's good to see you... I'd love to hear how it's going at your school. Abbey, it's really good to see you, too :).



Robin