Variation in the lexical verb in inner‐Sydney English

RULES AND SCHEMAS IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF THE ENGLISH PAST TENSE Joan L. BybeeDan I. Slobin State University of New York,University of California, BuffaloBerkeley Consistent error patterns in English past-tense forms are reported for three age groups: preschoolers, 8-10-year-olds, and adults. It is argued that, although irregular forms are rote-learned, speakers make generalizations about such forms. Such a generalization is defined as a schema which describes general phonological properties of a morphological class, and is used in organizing and accessing the lexicon. Schemas for the English past tense develop and change with age, yielding implications for both acquisitional and diachronic theory.* 1. English verbal morphology is rather restricted, compared to that of a fullfledged inflectional language, since it offers only four inflectional morphemes: the 3rd singular present, the past tense, the past participle, and the progressive. Thus it provides no opportunity to study the complex interaction between intersecting inflectional categories within a paradigm, such as person, number, mood, and tense. It does, however, provide the opportunity for a study of a different sort: although English has a demonstrably productive process of suffixation for past-tense formation, in the form of -ed, it also has many irregular verbs whose past tense is formed in some cases without suffixation, and in others with changes of vowel (or, less commonly, consonant) in the stem. These irregular verbs are relatively few in number. Bloch 1947 identifies about 200 (several of which are archaic), but thousands of verbs form their past tense by adding an allomorph of -ed. Although irregular verbs are relatively insignificant as to type frequency, the picture is quite different when token frequency is considered: these are among the most frequent verbs of the language . Of the 30 most frequent past-tense forms (Kucera & Francis 1967), 22 are irregular. The situation changes radically in the second 30 most frequent past-tense forms, where 8 are irregular. From the child learner's point of view, irregular verbs are also prominent: Slobin 1971 finds that, in 49 hours of adult speech to Roger Brown's subject Eve, between the ages of 18 and 26 months, irregular past-tense forms account for 292 of the past-tense tokens, while regular verbs comprise only 99. Thus irregular past-tense forms constitute an important core of English verbal morphology. * A number of people contributed to the research reported here, and we would like to thank them for their help. Susan Ervin-Tripp, Roger Brown, and Zell Greenberg made their spontaneous speech data available to us; Zell Greenberg tested the preschool children and analysed the results; Amy Strage and Ann Eisenberg tested the adults; Mr. B. Harris and his third-grade class at Cornell Elementary School, Albany, CA, played the 'verb game' with us; Tanya Renner, Carol Lynn Moder, and BongHee Choi helped with the statistics; and Brody Hooper let us use his verb forms and his friends. While this research was being conducted, loan Bybee held a Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. This research was also supported by the University of California Committee on Research and the Institute of Human Learning, University of California, Berkeley. 265 266LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) The difficulty presented by these irregular verbs, both for the learner and for the linguist, is that so many different irregularities occur. Though most irregulars are characterized by a vowel change, a number of different changes occur, e.g. stick/stuck, sing/sang, keep/kept, grow/grew. In addition, some verbs add a t or d; and some have consonant changes as well, e.g. makelmade. Jespersen 1942 lists ten classes of irregular past-tense formations, and dozens of sub-classes, while Bloch comes up with twenty conjugation types. Such variety increases the difficulty of the learning task, but at the same time provides us with an opportunity to investigate the interaction of rule and rote-learning in morphology. It is clear that some rote-learning is necessary in acquiring irregular past-tense forms: the pair go/went could not be learned in any other way. What is not so clear is whether speakers must learn all irregulars by rote, or whether...

Some Portuguese verbs have two past participle forms: one regular (stem +-do), and the other irregular (often identical to the first person singular present indicative). Per grammars, the perfect auxiliariester/havertake regulars, while irregulars appear with passive/adjectivalser/estar. To test these claims, we analyzed naturally-occurring data from Brazil (twentieth century) and Portugal (nineteenth and twentieth). We coded 1077 tokens from 21 verbs for ten predictors and performed mixed-effects logistic regressions in R. Irregulars appear withter/haver54% overall and in 68% of cases from Portugal. Our results demonstrate that past participle choice is determined by the interaction of several linguistic factors. While lexical verb is the most significant predictor of participle selection, verbs with irregular participles identical to the first person singular present indicative occur in the irregular significantly more than other verbs. We conclude that analogical processes underpin the variation. This conclusion allows us to adjudicate between competing accounts of past participle choice in Portuguese.

Purpose: This study addresses the question of whether sequential bilingual children’s past tense marking development in their second language (L2) is affected by their knowledge of temporal marking in their first language (L1). We investigated whether Cantonese-English sequential bilingual children’s knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese (L1), along with external and internal factors, predicts their past tense marking in English (L2). Method: We examined 39 pre-school children’s production of perfective aspect markers in Cantonese and regular and irregular past tense morphemes in English using a story-retell task administered in both languages. Result: The results showed that children produced significantly more irregular past tense verbs than regular past tense verbs in English. Their English irregular past tense use, but not regular past tense use, was predicted by their knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese. Conclusion: Findings suggest that semantic transfer between Cantonese and English might contribute to the early stages of acquiring English past tense marking. Clinically, the results could potentially lead to more informed assessment procedures and better diagnostic decision making for bilingual children.

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has been an important issue in cognitive science and has been used to advance different models of the organization of language in the brain. The dual-system view holds that the regular past tense forms are generated by a rule while irregular forms are retrieved from memory. The single-system view, on the other hand, holds that both forms are generated by a single integrated system and differ only in their reliance on factors such as phonology and semantics. We conducted an event-related fMRI study to examine the activation patterns associated with the generation and reading of regular and irregular past tense forms, in addition to the reading of their stems. Regular and irregular past tense generation activated similar brain regions compared to the reading of their respective stems. The areas activated more for irregular generation compared to regular generation included inferior frontal, precentral, and parietal regions bilaterally. This activation can be interpreted as reflecting the greater attentional and response selection demands of irregular generation. Compared to irregular generation, regular generation activated a small region in the left superior temporal gyrus when the regular and irregular past tense forms were mismatched on phonological complexity. No areas were more activated for regulars than irregulars when the past tense forms were matched on this variable. This suggests that the activation specific to regulars was related to the higher phonological complexity of their past tense forms rather than to their generation. A contrast of the reading of regular and irregular past tense forms was consistent with this hypothesis. These results support a single-system account of past tense generation.

The large majority of the Slavic languages have in historical times lost the synthetic past tenses of the aorist and the imperfect. These tenses were replaced by a new past tense based on the erstwhile perfect. This transformation created space for new ways of forming a past tense, and one of these was a novel past tense based on the past active participle, also called the gerundial past tense, a past tense found in Northwest Russia, above all in the Pskov area, cf. Pskov dialectal i jon pom'orši toper’ uže, versus Standard Russia i on teper’ uže umer, ‘and he died now already’. The point of this article is to demonstrate how the emergence of the l-participle as the general past tense opened up for a reanalysis of the past active participle as a finite past tense verb-form. The actualization process following this reanalysis is illustrated by examples from the Pskov Chronicle.

Modern Standard Danish distinguishes between a perfect participle and a supine. The perfect participle is an adnominal non-finite form of the verb, ascribing properties to a referent (as do the prototypical adjectives) and morpho-syntactically agreeing with this referent. The supine is an indeclinable non-finite form of a verb, ending in -t, used as a component in periphrastic verb forms. Outside the attributive position, the perfect participle is used in complement constructions with the copula verbs være ‘be’ and blive ‘be’/‘become’; the supine is used in perfective constructions and periphrastic passives with the auxiliaries have ‘have’, få ‘get’, være ‘be’ and blive ‘be’/‘become’. In Modern Standard Danish, the perfect participle has restricted use (it is the marked member of the paradigm perfect participle vs. supine); the supine has a wider domain of usage (it is the unmarked member of the paradigm). In the nineteenth century, this was different. Back then, the perfect participle was the unmarked form with a wide usage domain, whereas the supine had a more restricted use. This paper presents a study of these verb forms in two corpora representing different chronolects of Danish, one corpus consisting of texts from the nineteenth century, one of texts from Modern Standard Danish.

:Afrikaans passive constructions have received significant attention in the literature for almost a century. The matter of using was instead of is in past tense passives is regularly attended to, and usually condemned in certain contexts of use. This article explores three related topics regarding Afrikaans passives with the use of a corpus of Afrikaans from 1911–2010. (1) The topic of usage patterns of Afrikaans passives in general and was passives more specifically is explored by showing, among other things, a stable ratio between past and present tense verb forms and stable agentivity, as well as showing that was passives are fairly infrequent in the data and decreasing slightly. (2) The next matter concerns details of was passive use, and three different tense distinctions are found in the data: simple past tense, past perfect tense, and, somewhat unexpectedly, dissociated past tense. Some unexpected increases and decreases in usage are reported. (3) The possibility of English influence causing the ‘incorrect’ uses of was in the passive as proposed by grammars are investigated; drawing on theory on contact-induced change and the corpus data, it is proposed that Afrikaans past tense copula constructions are more likely responsible for simple past tense was passives.

Difficulty with marking past tense verbs is a clinical indicator of language disorders. However, there is too little information on language development in bilingual children living in multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore to accurately diagnose language disorders. In this study, we aimed to understand language development in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual children by examining narrative-level discourse. We conducted secondary analysis of a large data set collected in Singapore. Here, we report on a total of 36 English-dominant and balanced English-Mandarin bilingual participants who produced narratives in English and Mandarin elicited via retell tasks using wordless picture books. Participants had been allocated to language dominance groups based on parental reports and performance on vocabulary tasks. We explored their productions of English regular and irregular past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers and examined the effect of language dominance on production of target forms. There was no significant difference between the language dominance groups on any outcome measures. Participants produced significantly more irregular past tense verb forms than regular past tense markers in English. The percentage accuracy of regular and irregular past tense verb forms was positively correlated with English expressive vocabulary scores. There was no significant correlation between Mandarin perfective aspect markers and Mandarin vocabulary scores. These findings suggest that acquisition of past tense marking in bilingual children is dependent on exposure to target verb forms. By providing normative data, these results can support clinical decision making around assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in linguistically complex communities in which there are limited standardized assessment tools normed on relevant populations.

This study examines the categorial status, syntactic derivation, and tense of active participles in an urban variety of Jordanian Arabic. It is shown that unlike in other Arabic varieties, active participles in Jordanian Arabic fall into three distinct categories (namely, nominal, adjectival, and verbal) with respect to their morphophonological, syntactic and semantic structures. Moreover, it is argued that active participles are not lexically underspecified or homophonous, but are rather derived distinctively in the syntax. This study also explores tense in active participle clauses. Verbless clauses with adjectival and nominal active participles as the only predicates solely project present tense; a past or future tense is available only if a copula is involved. In contrast, clauses with verbal active participles, which are morphologically unmarked for tense, are shown to license temporal adverbs of different time references. It is argued that such clauses project a covert agreement tense whose time frame is established by time adverbs.

The purposes of this study were to assess the acquisition order of nine English grammatical morphemes and to identify types of grammatical morphemes which seem difficult for Thai deaf university students. Thirty-seven Thai deaf university students completed 18 fill-in-the-blank questions. Data were analyzed by frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The results indicated that the English grammatical morpheme acquisition order of Thai deaf university students was as follows: 1) article (Mean (M) =1.38/3.00), 2) plural (M =1.36/3.00), 3) regular past tense (M =1.28/3.00), 4) progressive (M = 1.22/3.00), 5) the 3rd person singular simple present tense (M=1.16/3.00), 6) auxiliary (M = 1.53/3.00), 7) irregular past tense (M = 1.46/3.00), 8) copula (M = 0.41/3.00), and 9) possessive (M = 0.39/3.00). From the results, the 3rd person singular simple present tense, auxiliary, irregular past tense, copula, and possessive were considered difficult for the deaf participants. The findings from this study can be used for further pedagogical and curriculum development in teaching English grammatical morphemes to Thai deaf students.

The present paper investigates the past tense in Assamese from a Cognitive Linguistics point of view. We notice that the present is unmarked whereas the past and future are marked for tense in Assamese. In the traditional linguistic literature of Assamese such as Kakati (1995), U. N. Goswami (1997), Bharali (2000) and G. C. Goswami (2000), the morpheme - il is identified as the past tense marker in the language. In designating - il as the past tense marker the contrast between “past” and “past with present relevance” is, however, missed. On the contrary, the current paper argues that the past tense in Assamese is marked by - isil, and not by - il. An adverbial test with the time adverb eimātra ‘just now’ is applied to establish that - isil, not - il, is the past marker. Dahl (1985) and Bybee et al. (1994) observed that the past is a cross linguistic category and is predominantly marked morphologically. It may be noted that Assamese is not an exception to this observation. The paper also argues that the ‘be’ verb form āsil ‘existed’ is not ās combined - il; but is rather ās combined - isil and is a phonologically reduced form of ās-isil. The paper then examines past habituality and remoteness distinction in past in Assamese; and it is found that - isil combined thāk ‘stay’ generates past habitual meaning whereas Assamese does not maintain any remoteness distinction in past.

Opposing views of storage and processing of morphologically complex words (e.g., past tense) have been suggested: the dual system, whereby regular forms are not in the lexicon but are generated by rule, while irregular forms are explicitly represented; the single system, whereby regular and irregular forms are computed by a single system, using associative connections; and a system whereby phonological rules relate both regular and irregular past to present tense forms. Two reaction time experiments investigated the production of the past tense in English in response to the auditory presentation of the present tense of the verb. The first experiment addressed the methodology of presenting regulars and irregulars in blocked form as in a previous study (Jaeger et al. in Language 72:451-497, 1996). Blocked presentation results showed longer RTs for the elicitation of irregular pasts than for regular pasts; however, there were no differences between regular and irregular elicitation when the presentation was randomized, indicating that it is rules that are being primed. The second experiment tested whether the response time advantage found for blocked regular verbs in the first experiment might also extend to irregular verb forms exhibiting the same sub-regularity (e.g., sing-sang may prime ring-rang). Results showed a trend towards slower RTs when past tense forms from different sub-regularities follow one another, suggesting interference between one sub-regularity and another.

This paper explores whether the poor mastery of morphosyntax exhibited by second language (L2) learners can be tied to difficulties with non-syntactic processing. Specifically, we examine whether problems with English regular and irregular past tense are related to poor L2 phonological ability and lexical access, respectively. In Experiment 1, L2 learners showed poorer past tense mastery than native English speakers in grammaticality judgment and production tasks. L2 phonological ability was positively correlated with correct performance on regular verbs and negatively with unmarked production. L2 lexical access was positively correlated with correct performance on irregular verbs, and negatively with overregularization production. Experiment 2 simulated these difficulties in native English speakers by placing them under phonological processing (noise) or lexical access (deadline) stress. Noise selectively impacted regular verbs in grammaticality judgment but impacted all verb types in production. Deadline pressure impacted irregular verbs while sparing regular verbs across both tasks. Thus, non-syntactic processing difficulties can have specific impacts on morphosyntactic performance in both non-native and native English speakers.

Rules, representations, and the English past tense

The objective of the study is to investigate the difficulty of using irregular verbs in the students writing an essay at the University of Babylon. The design of this study is descriptive qualitative research. The sample of the study comprised 25 students in their fourth year, and it was selected randomly. The findings of the study showed that 70% of the students were unable to use irregular cases such as verbs and adjectives incorrectly. Also, the findings show that the students use both regular and irregular verb (past) in their students' writing essays. The most dominant verb past written by the students in their students’ writing essay is an irregular verb. Regular verbs are verbs that can change according to tense and change it regularly. Regular verbs are verbs whose changes comply with normal rules, that is with add the letter -d or -ed to the verb first-form/verb-1 (infinitive) so that it becomes a verb form second/verb-2 (past tense). Several things must be considered in the way of forming regular verbs by adding the letter -ed suffix or -d in the basic verb/verb-1 (infinitive). Irregular verbs are verbs that change according to the tense and do not comply with normal compliance. The past tense Irregular verbs are not formed from basic verbs/verb-1 (infinitives) plus letters -d or -ed letters to form verb-2/past tense. Irregular verbs form their past tense differently (through) not always) through a vowel and consonant change. This study recommends students should be well-trained on how to use irregular verbs in the past tense case or changing the form of the regular adjective, and also must be memorized by the learners/students because of the difficulty to distinguish the irregular verbs among the sentences.