A curious thing.... I happened on this in searching for some background for some advice I was preparing to give a non-native English speaker regarding a piece he'd written. In it, he had written that a character "bargained, plead and cajoled with" another character. I started off trying to communicate that cajoling is something that the actor does alone - one doesn't cajole with someone - one merely cajoles someone. But then I got lost on "plead." It was obvious that he needed the past tense, but which one? To my thinking, "pled" works better on its own, while "pleaded" works better with the prepositional phrase - one pled, or one pleaded with another. I wasn't certain though that that was the case, so I went out onto the web looking for some sort of verification. Instead, I found this, so I thought I'd just drop it in here for comment.