Antidote 11 User Guide

User Guide / The Dictionaries / Conjugation Dictionary / Presentation

Dictionary of Conjugations

Conjugation in English is simpler than in many other Indo-European languages. English verbs don’t have nearly as many inflected forms as they do in French, for example. However, this does not mean that English grammar is any simpler than that of other languages: grammatical categories such as tense, person or mood are equally important in English, even if they do not systematically cause the form of a verb to change. Without context, the verb form eat, for example, could be in the infinitive, the first-person present indicative, or a number of other categories. Yet in certain categories, its form does change (ate, eaten, etc.).

In order to avoid potential mistakes, understanding why you are using the right form of a verb is just as important as using it. For example, in the sentence “It is necessary that he go”, the form go — and not goes, went, etc., — is used because the verb is in the third-person present subjunctive.

Perhaps because of the relatively limited variations in verb form, traditional English grammar resources have not typically included complete conjugation information by grammatical category. Antidote, unconstrained by the limits of paper reference material, provides a comprehensive set of tenses, moods and persons along with their corresponding forms. Auxiliaries for compound forms are also listed (e.g. have in the past perfect have eaten), as is the progressive aspect. This information is displayed clearly and intuitively in the form of a table, which can be expanded to show all conjugations, or condensed to display only the main ones.

Naturally, you can still rely on the corrector to spot any conjugation mistakes, but checking the conjugation dictionary can help you to learn, verify and compare in far greater depth.