Joe Trotta and Monika Mondor present their research. The lecture is as a part of the research area Linguistic structures' seminar series. All interested are welcome!
An oft-noted feature of non-standard dialects of English is the use of past tense forms instead of past participle forms in cases when those forms would be different, as in did/done, wrote/written, saw/seen, etc. (e.g., Anderwald, 2008). As noted in the literature, this typically occurs in connection with the perfective aspect as shown in the following examples (all attested in the COCA corpus):
1) a. … but Stella had drove the mail to our house for years...
b. …the hurt you feel for what you have did is worth the feeling of it…
c. You couldn't have wrote it better…
The use of the past tense form where a participle is required (referred to here for convenience as ‘leveled participle’ or ‘LP’) in these constructions is commonly noted as a mostly spoken alternative in many non-standard English varieties, in particular African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Southern White English (SWE) (cf. Munn and Tortora, 2014, Kortmann, 2006: 607, among others).
We see the LPs in these constructions as being more complex and nuanced than the previous research would indicate. In the present paper, we examine LPs through a systemic corpus study of the Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (the BNC), supplemented by additional attested data such as transcripts from podcasts, YouTube videos and online video games. Our aim is to shed critical light on what factors are connected to this variant as regards collocational, textual and situational factors as well as whatever regional or social variables may be involved. We show that, though the examples evidenced in the corpora are primarily spoken, LPs also occur in written texts and are not as limited to non-standard usages as the literature indicates.
In addition, we present data on this phenomenon outside of the perfective aspect (please note that for the purposes of this study we consider aspect and tense to be separate, but related, grammatical categories). Though it clearly occurs to a much lesser extent in other contexts, it can be found in passive constructions (e.g., I am an American, and I feel what was did was wrong). With a solid grounding in the corpus material, we present a richer picture of LP usage, we scrutinize previous analyses of the construction, give a brief view of this participial variant over time, and discuss whether the data indicates that the LP form is on the rise in Present-day English.
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