“I seen him.”

Common English Blunders, Verbs

I frequently hear sentences constructed in this way.

Problem:
A verb’s past participle appears on its own where the verb’s past-tense form should be placed.

Explanation:
This problem is the complement to what I posted yesterday.

In other words, there seems to be a tendency among some American English speakers to mix the past participle with the past tense.

The past participle of the verb “see” is “seen”, and “seen” requires an auxiliary verb — in the present or past tense — to form a perfect tense.

Otherwise, the past tense should be used in place of “seen”.

This gives us three solutions, depending on the intent of the speaker.

Solutions:
“I saw him.”
OR
“I have seen him.”
OR
“I had seen him.”

“He has ran five miles.”

Common English Blunders, Verbs

I frequently hear sentences constructed in this way.

Problem:
A past-tense verb appears where the verb’s past participle is required.

Explanation:
The auxiliary verb “has” must be combined with a past participle to form a perfect tense.

Here are some examples:

  • He has eaten the piece of pie.
  • He has shaved five minutes off his marathon time.
  • He has cut his finger.

The first example uses “eaten” — the past participle of “eat”.

The second example uses “shaved” — the past participle of “shave”.

The third example uses “cut” — the past participle of “cut”.

The past participle of “run” is “run”, not “ran”, which is the past tense of “run”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following combinations (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “has run” — 6,780,000 matches
  • “has ran” — 203,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “has run” over “has ran” by a 33.4:1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“He has run five miles.”

“If ya’all could lay out…”

Contractions

I saw this in an email message.

Problem:
The contraction is improperly formed.

Explanation:
I saw “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” on television last evening. A question was under the category of first-graded grammar, and it asked for the number of contractions in a particular sentence. The contestant — a working adult — got the answer wrong because, as he admitted, he did not know what a contraction was.

Sad!

Today, I saw an email message in which the contraction for “you all” — an American colloquial form of the plural second-person pronoun — was spelled Y-A-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

A contraction is correctly formed by replacing one or more letters with an apostrophe, not by replacing one or more letters with one or more other letters and an apostrophe.

The contraction of “you all” is spelled Y-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

Solution:
“If y’all could lay out…”