The problem of deciding between past and perfect does not arise for regular English verbs. The forms are the same: I talked, I have talked.
The difficulties arise with irregular verbs, where the past and the past participle forms are different (go, went, gone; bite, bit, bitten; and so on). Some require special comment.
Drunk, swum, and others.- In many dialects the past participle form of verbs like sing and drink is used for the past tense. For instance, people say X. The ship sunk and X. We begun yesterday. This is wrong in Standard English.
With some verbs, there are alternative forms for the past and past participle. The verb spin, for example, has spun and the old-fashioned span as past-tense forms: She spun/? Span some cotton. The past participle in spun: She has spun some cotton.
Shrink has shrunk and shrank as past-tense forms. Most people use shrunk to mean ‘got smaller’, as in The pullover shrunk in the wash, but shrank to mean ‘recoiled’, as in He shrank back in horror. The past particle is shrunk: The pullover has shrunk in the wash. The form shrunken is now used only as an adjective: a shrunken head.
All the other similar verbs have lost the distinctive past form completely, such as slink, slunk, slunk and wring, wrung, wrung.
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