Question

What is the past participle of “to talk”?

Answer 1

Hint: In general a ‘participle’ is a term that is formulated from any verb. When we say ‘past participle’ it is a part of the perfect tense as well as passive tenses. It is because a perfect tense is formed with ‘had/have+ past participle. Sometimes the past participle can behave like an adjective.

Complete answer:
We know that verbs have a way of changing according to time, such a change is called a tense. Each verb can be conjugated in a variety of tenses. The verb when not conjugated is said to be in the infinitive form. Here when we talk about ‘past participle’ we know that they are sometimes used within a tense, otherwise used to modify pronouns or nouns and otherwise act as adjectives.
We are given a verb ‘to talk’; this verb is in its infinitive form.
For most regular verbs, the past tense form itself serves as its past participle. The general form of a past participle is that it ends with –ed. Other irregular verbs have past participles that need to be memorized over time.
If the tense used in a sentence is a perfect tense, then we can take the past participle from the formation of the perfect tense that is of the form ‘have/had + past participle’.
When we write this verb in different tense conjugations we see;
Present form: I/you/we/they + talk, he/she/it + talks
Past form: (regardless of subject) + talked
Perfect form: have/had + talked ()

Looking at the past tense and perfect tense, clearly the verb ‘to talk’ is of the regular form. It takes the past tense by ending with –ed.
So the same is used with the perfect tense also. The perfect form for ‘to talk’ as conjugated above implies that ‘talked’ is the past participle.
So take an example;
Diya talked to her father. (Here ‘talked’ is of the past tense)
Diya had talked to her father last night. (Here ‘had talked’ forms the past perfect tense, where ‘talked’ acts as a past participle)

Therefore the past participle of the given verb ‘to talk’ is ‘talked’.

Note: The different type of participles includes ‘past participle’, ‘present participle’ and ‘perfect participle’. For a ‘present participle’ we append –ing to the root verb, while for a ‘perfect participle’ is made by joining the words ‘having’ and the past participle of the root verb. So ‘perfect participle’ is a combination of past and present participles.