Year: 2011
Type: article
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 likeshe drunkorthey sungare 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 likedrink – drank – drunkis 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).
Source: English Language and Linguistics
Author: LIESELOTTE ANDERWALD
Institution: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2106398019