Lieselotte Anderwald

Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung

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).

Are non-standard dialects more 'natural' than the standard ? A test case from English verb morphology

In this article, I argue that at least in some subsets of grammar, non-standard dialects are indeed more natural than their standard counterparts. I present data from the new Freiburg English Dialect corpus FRED, for the first time comparing and quantifying traditional dialect data from across the whole of Great Britain. The most frequent non-standard verb forms cluster around forms like drink - drunk ― drunk and sing ― sung ― sung. The framework of Natural Morphology (Wurzel 1984, I987) in combination with Bybees Network Model (Bybee 1985, 1995) is employed to define the notion of naturalness and to explain why this verb class has been strengthened historically, and is still attracting new members today.

Measuring the success of prescriptivism: quantitative grammaticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive

This article connects the quantitative study of grammaticography with a more traditional corpus-linguistic investigation of the progressive passive. Based on a careful analysis of over 250 grammars of English published during the nineteenth century in Britain and the US, I will try to answer the question whether prescriptivism has had any influence on purported differences between British and American English in the rise of the progressive passive. This article will argue that text-type sensitivity is the overriding factor determining the occurrence of the progressive passive in the nineteenth century, rather than national differences between British and American English. Prescriptive comments during the nineteenth century did not influence developments in American English significantly. However, during the 1950s modern-style prescriptivism can be shown to have massive effects on American newspaper language. Combining quantitative historical grammaticography and corpus-linguistic studies can thus extend our insights into the factors that influence language change.

‘He rung the bell’ and ‘she drunk ale’ – non-standard past tense forms in traditional British dialects and on the internet

On the basis of data from the new Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) and data from the internet, this paper investigates the use of non-standard past tense forms for a group of verbs similar in shape to (and including) drink and ring. In traditional dialect data from across Great Britain, non-standard past tense forms are highly frequent for these verbs and often even constitute the majority option. Their existence can on the one hand be traced back to historical forms. Investigations of present-day informal language as documented on the internet confirms that these non-standard forms are still in (frequent) use. Historical continuity alone does not, however, explain their extremely frequent occurrence in traditional dialect data, nor their occurrence today. In the framework of natural morphology, I propose abstract analogy as a functional principle that can be seen to work on this class of verbs, increasing overall system congruity (in the sense of Wurzel 1984, 1987) and thus stabilizing the inflectional system(s) of these dialects.