Non-Standard "-ed" Forms of Selected Irreguslar Verbs: A Corpus-based Study of Present-day American English

Abstract

This is a corpus-based study which aims to survey the parallel use of non-standard preterit and past participle "-ed" forms in a group of irregular verbs (namely "blow", "grow", "know", and "throw") in Present-day American English and to determine in what media, style registers, and text types such non-standard verb forms occur. The data for this analysis is provided by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) which comprises texts from the period of 1990 - 2010. The study confirms the fact that the majority of non-standard "-ed" verb forms occur in direct speech in fiction and, to a less degree, in newspspers in order to represent sociolectal and dialectal traits in varnacular English. Apart from this, non-standar "-ed" forms are inconspicuous in COCA; rare occurrences of such forms do not display a tendency towards regularization of morphological irregularity in the use of verbs under study. This study also confirms the variety-specific variation in the use of past participle forms of verbs such as "burn", "dream", "learn", "spell", "spill", and "spoil" since forms with the "-t" suffix shich are characteristic of BrE are rarely reported in COCA.