Regional variation in the English verb qualifier system

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sampson

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.

Author(s):  
Andrew Spencer

The chapter presents an overview of phenomena which pose important problems of description and analysis. I focus on the inflectional system, which has undergone severe attrition and shows idiosyncrasies typical of such systems. For nominals I describe the personal pronoun paradigm and the ‘possessive -s’ clitic/phrasal affix. The controversial categorial status of adverbs in -ly is discussed, while for verbs, all the subcategories prove to be highly problematical. For instance, only 50 irregular verbs distinguish past tense from past participle (e.g. wrote/written), so it is not even clear whether the past participle category is a highly restricted subcategory, with the vast majority of verbs showing past tense/past participle syncretism, or whether this is a case of ‘overdifferentiation’, like the forms am, are, were of the verb BE. On the other hand, the polyfunctionality of the completely regular -ing suffix, which derives verb, noun, and adjective forms, also poses serious unresolved problems. Auxiliary verbs and related phenomena alternate between periphrastic, clitic, and genuinely morphological (affixal) constructions. The chapter concludes with consideration of those aspects of derivational morphology which seem to be indisputably productive, hence part of the grammar, including (certain types of) event nominalization, some cases of double object alternation, and morphosemantic mismatches of the kind electrical engineering ⇒ electrical engineer.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (9) ◽  
pp. 1870-1885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Regel ◽  
Andreas Opitz ◽  
Gereon Müller ◽  
Angela D. Friederici

Neuropsychological research investigating mental grammar and lexicon has largely been based on the processing of regular and irregular inflection. Past tense inflection of regular verbs is assumed to be generated by a syntactic rule (e.g., show-ed), whereas irregular verbs consist of rather unsystematic alternations (e.g., caught) represented as lexical entries. Recent morphological accounts, however, hold that irregular inflection is not entirely rule-free but relies on morphological principles. These subregularities are computed by the syntactic system. We tested this latter hypothesis by examining alternations of irregular German verbs as well as pseudowords using ERPs. Participants read series of irregular verb inflection including present tense, past participle, and past tense forms embedded in minimal syntactic contexts. The critical past tense form was correct (e.g., er sang [he sang]) or incorrect by being either partially consistent (e.g., *er sung [*he sung]) or inconsistent (e.g., *er sing [*he sing]) with the proposed morphological principles. Correspondingly, in a second experimental block, pseudowords (e.g., tang/*tung/*ting) were presented. ERPs for real words revealed a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of a negativity and P600 for both incorrect forms in comparison to the correct equivalents. Most interestingly, the P600 amplitude for the incorrect forms was gradually modulated by the type of anomaly with medium amplitude for consistent past tense forms and largest amplitude for inconsistent past tense forms. ERPs for pseudoword past tense forms showed a similar gradual modulation of N400. The findings support the assumption that irregular verbs are processed by rule-based mechanisms because of subregularities of their past tense inflection.


Infotekmesin ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (01) ◽  
pp. 14-23
Author(s):  
Dang Anom ◽  
Danuri Danuri ◽  
Jaroji Jaroji

Irregular is verbs on English do not add with ed or d but change agree with rule. To listen andcomprehend only memorize from verb base make past tense and past participle. Because this resultmany people so think difficult in learning English specially of irregular verbs. Aim of this research is to make application dictionary irregular verbs base android to make support in listen English specially irregular verbs. Scheme of system use Unified Modelling Language, java programming and sqlite database. This research produce a application dictionary irregular verbs to use device mobile base android


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Seeff-Gabriel ◽  
Shula Chiat ◽  
Tim Pring

Although many children are referred with difficulties in both their speech and their language, the literature offers relatively little guidance on their therapy. Should clinicians treat these difficulties independently? Or should treatment depend on the potential impact of one domain on the other? This study aimed to investigate the relationship between speech and morphosyntax in treatment for a 5-year-old boy, B, with speech and language difficulties. Therapy targeted the production of regular past tenses and plurals. B had the necessary phonology for the former but not the latter. Therapy therefore directly targeted production of the past tense but targeted plurals by treating the production of the necessary phonology. After therapy, B successfully produced regular past tenses for both treated and untreated verbs. Irregular verbs did not improve. Treatment for production of word-final /s/ was successful and generalized to untreated words but not to the production of /s/ in initial or medial positions. Plurals formed by adding /s/ but not those by adding /z/ benefited. Similar treatment for production of word-final /z/ was also successful and appeared to generalize to words with /z/ in initial and medial positions. However, although plurals were now marked, they were usually realized as [dz]. The results of this single-case study demonstrate that intervention for children with speech and language impairments should take account of the aspects of speech and morphology that are impaired, and the ways these may impact on each other.


1998 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van der Linden

In the literature about fossilization, several definitions have been given and several explanations have been suggested for this phenomenon. I see fossilization as a long-time stagnation in the T2 learning process, leading to errors based on transfer. Fossilization is caused by sociolinguistic, pyscholinguistic and purely linguistic factors. In this paper I concentrate on the acquisition of syntactic structures and on the role of input and instruction in that process. I argue that, although in the acquisition of some syntactic structures, UG plays an important role, this does not account for the whole learning process: learners have not only to reset parameters when acquiring T2 but have to proceduralize knowledge based on the surface structure of sentences. In the case of the use of past tenses in French, many of the Dutch advanced learners of three different levels of proficiency do not acquire native-like intuitions about the use of these tenses, although input as well as instruction are thorough on this point. I suggest that the past tense system is not UG-dependent and that the instruction does not allow proceduralization of the knowledge.


Linguistics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Midori Hayashi ◽  
David Y. Oshima

AbstractIt is a common perception that in languages having multiple past tenses with different remoteness specifications, the past tenses cover the entire past without a gap or overlap. This paper demonstrates that this way of looking at multiple-past tense systems is not appropriate for the system in South Baffin Inuktitut (a variety of the Inuit language). The dialect has at least four past tenses: recent, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, and distant. We argue that the relation between the four tenses cannot be represented by a simple linear scheme for two reasons. First, the pre-hodiernal past has a special status as the “conventionally designated alternative”, which is chosen in cases of remoteness indeterminacy, analogous to, for example, the Russian masculine gender being used in cases of gender indeterminacy. Second, there is overlap in their coverage. The pre-hodiernal and hodiernal past tenses collectively cover the entire past and thus any past situation can be described with one of them. The other two provide means to make more fine-grained and subjective temporal specifications. Comparison will be made between the system in South Baffin Inuktitut and those in some Bantoid languages which have been pointed out in the literature to have a comparable layered system of tenses.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Ahkam Arifin ◽  
Suryani Jihad ◽  
Sri Mulyani ◽  
Hardiani Ardin ◽  
Nurwahida Nurwahida

This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that there appears a systematic order of the acquisition of past tenses. It is claimed that irregular past tense verbs are acquired earlier than regular past tense verbs. In comparison to the acquisition of irregular and regular past verbs, the acquisition of the past copula be forms `was` and `were` is believed to take place much earlier. To test this hypothesis, the data were collected from forty-six students who were asked to write an essay with a minimum of 250 words to get data of the use of past tenses. The findings reveal partial support for the hypothesis, suggesting that the universal order of morpheme acquisition may not be a stable phenomenon.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Yasir Alotaibi

This paper discusses tense in Arabic based on three varieties of the language: Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the Taif dialect (TD). We argue against previous analyses that suggest that Arabic is a tenseless language, which assume that tense information is derived from the context. We also argue against the suggestion that Arabic is tensed, but that its tense is relative, rather than absolute. We propose here that CA, MSA, and TD have closely related verb forms, and that these are tensed verbs. Tense in Arabic is absolute in a neutral context and verb forms take the perfective and imperfective aspect. Similar to other languages including English, verb forms in Arabic may take reference from the context instead of the present moment. In this case, we argue that this does not mean that tense in Arabic is relative, because this would also imply that tense in many languages, including English, is relative. Further, we argue that the perfective form indicates only the past tense and the imperfective form, only the present; all other interpretations are derived by implicature.


Author(s):  
Natalie Batmanian ◽  
Karin Stromswold

Spontaneous speech data from three monolingual Turkish-speaking children between the ages 2;1 and 2;8 revealed that children produce bare lexical stems in ungrammatical contexts before they use grammatical morphemes productively. Given that root words are very rare in Turkish, the fact that Turkish children produce them indicates that they are able to decompose multimorphemic words into root + grammatical affixes. We also tested the hypothesis that when the correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning is one-to-one, morphemes are likely to be acquired earlier than when the correspondence between form and meaning is one-to-many (Slobin, 1973). Three grammatical morphemes, despite appearing equally frequently in adult speech, were acquired at different stages by children. The past tense inflection –di, which has a one-to-one correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning, is the morpheme that was acquired first by the children.


2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 820-840 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA BABCOCK ◽  
JOHN C. STOWE ◽  
CHRISTOPHER J. MALOOF ◽  
CLAUDIA BROVETTO ◽  
MICHAEL T. ULLMAN

It remains unclear whether adult-learned second language (L2) depends on similar or different neurocognitive mechanisms as those involved in first language (L1). We examined whether English past tense forms are computed similarly or differently by L1 and L2 English speakers, and what factors might affect this: regularity (regular vs. irregular verbs), length of L2 exposure (length of residence), age of L2 acquisition (age of arrival), L2 learners’ native language (Chinese vs. Spanish), and sex (male vs. female). Past tense frequency effects were used to examine the type of computation (composition vs. storage/retrieval). The results suggest that irregular past tenses are always stored. Regular past tenses, however, are either composed or stored, as a function of various factors: both sexes store regulars in L2, but only females in L1; greater lengths of residence lead to less dependence on storage, but only in females; higher adult ages of arrival lead to more reliance on storage. The findings suggest that inflected forms can rely on either the same or different mechanisms in L2 as they do in L1, and that this varies as a function of multiple interacting factors.


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