Summary of findings

The most striking result of this investigation is the fact that processes predicted by universal morphological naturalness (Mayerthaler) play only a minor role. If anything, universal natural morphology predicts in the realm of the verb a continuous shift of strong verbs into the weak verb class (‘weakification’). However, the investigation in Chapter 4 has shown that while weakification does take place, it is by no means frequent and, in the majority of cases, can be explained by the retention of historically attested forms. Weakification, contrary to Mayerthaler's predictions, thus constitutes only a minor strategy. In the comparison with more modern data especially (e.g. from COLT, representing London teenage speech in the 1990s), we can see that strong verbs are remarkably resilient and resist the trend towards weakification on a grand scale.

Introduction

As already mentioned in section 1.1, weak verbs can very generally be considered a common Germanic innovation, although perhaps as many as 2 per cent may have come down from Indo-European, as West (2001: 54) points out. It is generally agreed that the class of strong verbs inherited from Indo-European, mainly characterized by ablaut in the Germanic languages, has been steadily diminishing in all Germanic languages, as verbs have been switching verb classes from strong to weak.

In terms of universal natural morphology, a switch of verbs from strong to weak constitutes a natural development (see section 2.9.1), and is one of the few predictions on verb classes that can be derived from Mayerthaler (1981, 1988). Strong verbs are either minimally iconic, if the meaning ‘Past’ is indicated solely through modulation (e.g. sing — sang), or they are less than maximally iconic, if the meaning ‘Past’ is indicated by the addition of a segment, but through modulation as well (e.g. keep — kept). Weak verbs on the other hand are always maximally iconic (the semantically marked meaning ‘Past’ corresponds to the formal addition of the segment <-ed>, e.g. hunt — hunted).

The past tense — a descriptive approach

PAST is the most frequently marked verbal category by far (e.g. according to Sampson 2002, based on figures from the British National Corpus), accounting for around 25 per cent of all verb forms in contemporary spoken British English. In comparison, the two next categories, negation or modals, both only account for roughly 12 per cent of verb forms, the perfect for around 8 per cent, and the progressive for under 6 per cent. The passive finally is at best marginal with a text probability of under 1 per cent.

Past tense formation in English appears to be a very simple matter. Nevertheless — or perhaps because of this simplicity — great theoretical significance has been attached to an analysis of the past tense because it is used as the prime example in a long-standing debate in morphological theory (more on which in Chapter 2).

Putting it in simple descriptive terms (although no description is of course theory-free, or truly pre-theoretical), the majority of English verbs today have past tense forms that consist of the present tense stem plus <-ed>.

Introduction

In this chapter, a range of seemingly quite different verbs will be discussed. They have in common that they are non-standard strong verbs with paradigms consisting of just two forms, while their standard English counterparts consists of three forms, e.g. drink — drunk — drunk vs. StE drink — drank — drunk; see — seen — seen vs. StE see — saw — seen; do — done — done vs. StE do — did — done and eat — eat — eaten vs. StE eat — ate — eaten. Two of these example paradigms are part of larger patterns: drink — drunk — drunk is what I will term a ‘Bybee’ verb, and there are a host of other verbs behaving like drunk, as section 5.2 will show.

Introduction

After the short descriptive overview in the previous chapter, this chapter will concentrate on the role of weak vs. strong past tense formation in various theoretical frameworks. Indeed, past tense formation has served and is serving as the test case for or against individual theoretical constructions, and this fact already merits a closer look at the various theories. In turn, different theories may make different predictions about what to expect in non-standard tense paradigms, and new observations from non-standard past tense paradigms in the remainder of the book may support or revise specific theories.

Although the systematic study of morphology goes back at least to Indian linguists like Panini (ca. fifth or sixth century BC), this tradition has not had a great impact on Western theorizing (although, as we shall see, some ideas have — without acknowledgement — found their way into generative theories).

Past tensecome

Introduction

1. He was at sea f' Christmas and she come in — there was just the wheel there. (FRED SFK 033) (Suffolk, South East)

2. We had to stop it when he come from the war. (FRED NTT 006) (Nottinghamshire, Midlands)

3. She wouldn't cut the bread when it come out the bakehouse, it was too hot. (FRED LAN 002) (Lancashire, North)

The non-standard use of come in the past tense is generally well known and seems to be a feature of enormous geographical spread — indeed Chambers includes it under his vernacular universals as one of ‘the most ubiquitous’ ‘markers of W[orking] C[lass] speech in widely scattered areas of the English-speaking world’ (Chambers 1995: 240). Chambers' inclusion of past tense come as a general indicator of ‘mainstream non-standard’ English (Chambers 1995: 241) equally means that this feature is so frequent it would qualify not as a dialect feature in the strict sense, but as a general non-standard feature. Past tense come is also mentioned by Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998: 332) for the majority of vernaculars in the US North and South, and is one of the most frequent non-standard past tense forms in Poplack and Tagliamonte's study of diaspora varieties of African American English (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001).

While tense and aspect in general have always interested me since my days as a student at the Free University Berlin and a class on the topic by Ekkehartd König, my interest in the non-standard past tense arose purely coincidentally. I was asked to write an overview of the morphology and syntax of the South East of England (Anderwald 2004), when — in the pursuit of some little-documented feature — I fell to reading whole texts from our corpus FRED from this area, especially those from London, noting down rather informally all non-standard features I came across. Many questions that this article raised could not be answered immediately, but I thought they deserved a more thorough investigation. In particular, the many and varied non-standard past tense forms had never been investigated in their regional extension, and I had the feeling that this would make a satisfying research topic.