Original scientific paper
Standards must have Fell: Analyzing Structural and Sociolinguistic Factors in Past Tense Spreading Normativity
Matjaž Zgonc
Abstract
This paper is concerned with the origin and normative status of structures such as ‘have went’, collectively termed past tense spreading. Literature review and corpus research reveal how PTS was initially an unmarked construction and later became a usage problem in American English. This is followed up by a survey with 159 respondents carried out among speakers of American English at the University of Kentucky in 2022. The results demonstrate that sociolinguistic parameters play only a minor role in correctness, acceptability and likelihood of use estimations for PTS whereas the presence of a modal premodifier significantly improves normativity judgments. This might be due to the increased friction between the verb’s function in perfect constructions and the prototypically adjectival form of the past participle.
Keywords
normativity; past tense; past participle; past tense spreading; American English
Hrčak ID:
318965
URI
Publication date:
15.7.2023.
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