Hans F. Nielsen

Tendencies in the Evolution of the Modern English Irregular Verbs

Irregular verbs in Modern English (ModE) are def ined in Hansen and Nielsen 1980 as verbs that are not inflected with the -(e)d suffix (/-d/, /-t/, /-id/) in their preterite (pt.) and past participle (pp.) forms (108-9, 127-41). Just over 200 verbs can be classified as irregular and are thus easily outnumbered by the regular verbs, which are today the only productive class, for example, the pt./pp. forms like automated, br~ed, masterminded, radicalized, and vacuumed. The ModE irregular verbs can formally (synchronically) be divided into the following types:

Kleiner deutscher Sprachatlas. Band 1, Konsonantismus; Teil 1, Plosive. Ed. by Werner H. Veith and Wolfgang Putschke, in collaboration with Lutz Hummel. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. 1984. xxxiii + 239:

fflerner deutscher S&dquo;prachatlas (KDSA) is the first computerized linguistic atlas ever to appear. The first published issue of the project is dedicated to Ludwig Erich Schmitt, who not only originally suggested the publication of a simplified edition of the questionnaire material investigated by Georg Wenker and Ferdinand Wrede between 1877 and 1933, but also realized the great potential that electronic data processing would entail in carrying out such a project. That a simplification (viz. Kiesner) of the Wenker data has been made is to be seen in the reduction of the

On the exceptions to the Germanic and High German consonant shifts and sp, st, sk in english

Abstract The exceptions to the Germanic and High German sound shifts were recently explained in terms of archiphonemes. The present paper aims at showing that such an explanation is neither probable nor necessary, and that the value of an archiphonemic interpretation of English (s)p, (s)t, (s)k, used in support of the above explanation, is questionable. Instead, the exceptions to the two sound shifts are seen as examples of ‘split plus merger’.