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| Title: | Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung |
| Author: | Lieselotte Anderwald |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://univis.uni-kiel.de/prg?show=info&key=138/persons/2011s:philos/englis/englis_3/anderw |
| Institution: | Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel |
| Linguistic Field: | Sociolinguistics |
| Subject Language: |
English
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| Abstract: | In this article I discuss the persistence of non-standard past tense forms in traditional and modern dialect data in the face of strong prescriptive norms against such non-standard forms. Past tense forms like she drunk or they sung are still encountered frequently, although prescriptive grammars have militated against such usage for over a century, as a detailed investigation of nineteenth-century grammar books can show. I will argue that an increasing insistence especially by British nineteenth-century grammarians on distinct paradigm forms like drink ??? drank ??? drunk is based on a (mistaken) Latin ideal and that it has not carried much weight with the ???average??? speaker for functional reasons: non-standard forms in can be functionally motivated and are more ???natural??? past tense forms in the sense of Wurzel (1984). |
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This article appears in English Language and Linguistics Vol. 15, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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