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Defective Verbs in English. In English grammar, defective verb is a traditional term for a verb that doesn't exhibit all the typical forms of a conventional verb. English modal verbs ( can, could, may, might, must, ought, shall, should, will, and would) are defective in that they lack distinctive third-person singular and nonfinite forms.
May is a modal verb, so it is "defective" in that it does not have the usual infinitive with "to". Might is a past-tense form of may — though, as Wikipedia puts it, it has "acquired an independent, present tense meaning".
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Defective refers to a word that is missing a grammatical element, such as a tense or case marker, while verb is a part of speech that expresses action or being. In other words, a defective word is one that is incomplete or incorrect in its grammatical form, while a verb is a specific type of word that conveys an action or state of being.
4 days ago · English Common defectives The most commonly recognized defective verbs in English are auxiliary verbs—the class of preterite-present verbs — can/could, may/might, shall/should, must, ought, and will/would (would being a later historical development). Though these verbs were not originally defective, in most varieties of English today, they occur only in a modal auxiliary sense. However ...
Aug 19, 2018 · 4. There aren't many defective verbs in English, but it's difficult to say exactly how many there are because some words might or might not be defective, depending on how willing you are to accept weird-sounding forms. For example, various linguists seem to have noted that for many English speakers, nothing sounds natural as the past participle ...
may. 'may' is the model of its conjugation. This defective modal helping verb exists only in the present and preterit tenses. It is followed by a main verb in the bare infinitive, or by [ have + past participle]. Both the present and the preterit may be used in combination with [ have + past participle] to express a guess or a possibility about ...
English modal verbs are badly defective. For instance, "must" has no inflected forms at all, and even most uninflected forms don't exist ("to must," "will must," etc.). This is not surprising, since modal verbs typically have just a functional meaning. The defective modal verbs I can think of are can/could, shall/should, will/would, may/might ...
