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List of Tables
1.1
OE Strong Verb Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7
2.1
Class I Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2
Class II Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3
Class IIIa Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.4
Class IIIb Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.5
Class IIIc Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.6
Classes IV and V Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.7
Class VI Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.8
LAEME faran vs. feran Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.9
Old English faran vs. feran Preterite Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.10 Class VIIa Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.11 Class VIIb Token Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.12 Frequency of smite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.13 Frequency of wax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.14 Frequency of walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.15 Frequency of grow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.16 Longitudinal Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
vi
3.1
Old English Class III Inflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2
Bi-alternate and Tri-alternate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3
Analogically Extended Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4
Tri-alternate LAEME Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.5
Bi-alternate LAEME Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.6
Class IV Strong Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.7
Bi-alternate vs. Tri-alternate Frequency
3.8
LAEME Cue Validity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.9
Class VII <-ēow> Preterites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.10 ME Principal parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.11 OE Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.12 EME Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.13 PDE Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.14 Cluster ∼ Outcome Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.15 Fly, flee, flow, flay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.16 Attestations of flew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.17 MED CCew Types vs. Cew Types
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3.18 LAEME CCew Tokens vs. Cew Tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.1
Class I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
4.2
Class II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.3
Class IIIa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.4
Class IIIb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.5
Class IIIc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.6
Class IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
4.7
Class V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
vii
4.8
Class V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
4.9
2nd sg. vs. 1st and 3rd sg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
4.10 Class I analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
4.11 Class I Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
4.12 Class II analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
4.13 Class II Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
4.14 Class III analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.15 Class III variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
4.16 Classes IV and V Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.17 Classes IV and V Variation
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.18 Northern Preterite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.19 Western Preterite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.20 EME Distribution of Long Vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
4.21 Swiss German Leveling, Kesswil Dialect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.22 Middle English Leveling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.1
Dental-Final Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.2
Weak Preterites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
5.3
OE Preterite Allomorph Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
5.4
Dental-Final Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
5.5
M1 Preterite Allomorph Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
5.6
Productive allomorphy in M1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
5.7
Syllable Count in Verb Stems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.8
Old French Dental-Final Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
5.9
Old French Dental-Final Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.10 Productive allomorphy in M2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
viii
5.11 M1 and M2 Productive Allomorphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.12 M3 and M4 Allomorphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
5.13 Old French Dental-Final Verbs in ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
5.14 M3 and M4 Syllable Count Vis-à-Vis Preterite Allomorphy . . . . . 154
5.15 PDE Allomorphy of Dental-Final Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
5.16 Proportions of Strong and Weak Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
6.1
Assignment of Verbs to OE Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
6.2
Vowel Quantity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
6.3
Frequency Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
6.4
Classifications by Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
6.5
CCew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
6.6
Class Membership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
6.7
Individual Class Membership
6.8
Vowel Quantity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
6.9
Climb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1
Background
The research presented here began in an independent study with Donka Minkova,
with the belief that ten weeks would would be sufficient to understand the development of the morphology of the strong verbs. At the end of the ten weeks,
I knew that my work had only begun. I was intrigued by the idiosyncrasy and
many unsolved mysteries of the strong verbs: why were the OED editors so evasive
in describing the possible reasons for the preterite of fly to have become flew, a
form that is not descended from its original preterite? I wanted to know why the
general principle that highly frequent strong verbs tended to be conservative in
their morphology and remain strong while infrequent verbs tended to become weak
seemed valid, yet there are so many exceptions to that principle. The infrequent
freeze is still strong in Present Day English (PDE), yet the frequent help is now
weak.
The groundwork of my project started with a talk at SHEL, presenting the
1
pilot results of my work thus far and laying out the directions that my future
research would take. Two days after my presentation in October 2007, an article
appeared in the LA Times reviewing a paper on English irregular past tenses that
had just appeared in the high-profile journal Nature, written by mathematicians
and biologists with an interest in applying their methodology to language change
(Lieberman et al. 2007). It was thus a matter of serendipity that public interest
in the history of English past tenses increased just as I was beginning to develop
my work into a dissertation project.
Lieberman et al. looked at irregular Old English (OE) verbs that are still
present in the lexicon of PDE. They gathered frequency data for these verbs,
and they found that the lower the frequency of a set of verbs, the higher the
percentage of verbs that had been regularized. They calculated the rates at which
verbs regularized relative to their frequency. Their goal was to relate the evolution
of language to evolution in the hard sciences, such as genetics and nuclear physics.
Based on their findings about the verbs, they made predictions about the future
of English, such as “wed” being the next verb likely to regularize, and “have” and
“be” not being likely to regularize within the lifetime of the English language.
The article by Lieberman et al. immediately stirred up a flurry of discussion
in both scholarly and popular venues. The media and bloggers responded positively. The author of the only recent book-length study of the English strong
verbs, Marcin Krygier, pointed out in a listserv the many philological errors they
had made. David Fertig later gave a talk (2009) challenging Lieberman et al.’s
emphasis on the regularization of irregular verbs, and their corresponding lack of
consideration of the irregularization of regular verbs, as well as challenging the
suitability of various individual verbs included in the study. These discussions
2
strengthened my conviction that the topic was not exhausted and that there were
serious philological and theoretical issues that were still in need of elucidation.
Even prior to the work of Lieberman et al., the past tenses of English verbs
fascinated scholars in two fields, psycholinguistics and the history of the English
language. Sweet (1900), Jespersen (1931), Long (1944), and Abbott (1957) are a
few among the historians of English who have recorded and classified strong verbs
at different periods in the language. Psycholinguists have found the strong verbs
to be a congenial testing ground for competing models of language change and
processing. Psycholinguistic models can be divided into three categories:
• Connectionism: all verb preterites are produced analogically (Bybee and
Moder 1983; Rumelhart and McClelland 1987; Hare and Elman 1995)
• The dual mechanism model: regular verb preterites are produced by rule,
and irregular verb preterites are produced through analogy and memorization (Prasada and Pinker 1993; Pinker 1999)
• The stochastic rule model: all verb preterites are produced by rules (Albright
and Hayes 2003).
These three categories of models can be viewed as ranging from purely analogic
to purely rule-based. They can also, however, be viewed in terms of the similarity
of the two models that attribute all verbs to the same mechanism, in opposition
to the model, called the dual mechanism model, that claims regular and irregular
verbs are handled fundamentally differently in the grammar.
The present dissertation straddles the two emphases, history of English and
linguistic processing, that studies of strong verbs have taken. The goal of my
work is to account for the diachronic evolution of the strong verbs, and, more
3
specifically, to answer the question of why some verbs have retained their strong
inflection while others became weak. I use the findings of theoretical linguistics to
propose psycholinguistic motivations for the changes to the strong verbs. I hope
that my own findings will add to the data on the history of the strong verbs in
a way that is useful to further research on modelling language change. Toward
this end, the dissertation brings to the table freshly gathered philological data,
evaluates existing hypotheses in light of the data, and develops additional new
hypotheses.
To provide the reader with an understanding of the existing knowledge on
which my study builds, the following two sections introduce the history of the
strong verbs in Old, Middle, and Present Day English, and work that has been
done on the subject hitherto. Section 1.2 presents the classification of and major
changes to the strong verb system in the history of English, Section 1.3 surveys the
studies on the shoulders of which my own work stands, and the following sections
present an introduction to the structure and methodology of the dissertation.
1.2
History of the Strong Verbs
In this section, I survey briefly the received knowledge on English strong verbs.
The strong verbs are defined as those that form their past tense by changing the
root vowel, such as run ∼ ran, in contradistinction to weak verbs, which form their
past tense by the addition of a suffix with a dental stop, such as walk ∼ walked,
and to irregular verbs that form their past tense by both or neither means, such
as keep ∼ kept or go ∼ went.
4
1.2.1
Present Day English
In PDE, the means of marking past tense are
• suppletion (go ∼ went)
• vowel change (come ∼ came)
• addition of a suffix ending in /d/ or /t/ (walk ∼ walked)
• no change (put ∼ put)
• vowel change plus suffix addition (keep ∼ kept).
Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1600-09) list 90 uncompounded verbs that
form their past tense through vowel change alone. Of these, 75 are descended
from original strong verbs. Others, such as bleed, acquired present-preterite vowel
alternations not through morphological change, but through a series of regular
phonological changes that triggered vowel shortening. Thus, despite their different
diachronic origins, bleed and come are classified alike synchronically. These verbs
are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, section 1.
The classification of irregular verbs in Huddleston and Pullum is along synchronic lines, appropriate to a synchronic grammar. The verbs are grouped according to the behavior of the vowel and the allomorphy of the dental preterite
suffix, if any, as well as any irregular consonant changes. This classification leads
stand, which was a strong verb in OE, to be classified most closely with make
and have, and to be classified more closely to originally weak catch than to the
originally strong verbs, such as shake, with which stand patterned in OE.
The classification of the present dissertation is along diachronic lines, appropriate to a work on the history of English. Stand is treated as a strong verb, like
5
shake, and original weak verbs like make and have are not included. The exception
is weak verbs ending in a dental, which are treated in Chapter 5, as noted, but
in the rest of the dissertation they are kept separate from the historically strong
verbs.
1.2.2
Old English
Hogg and Fulk’s A Grammar of Old English (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell,
December 8, 2010)1 divides OE verbs into the categories of strong, weak, preteritepresent, and athematic. Strong verbs are further subdivided into seven main
classes, according to their four principal parts. The principal parts are the infinitive, 3rd singular preterite indicative, plural preterite indicative, and past participle. Knowing the vocalism of each of these principal parts allows one to conjugate
all verbal forms.
Table 1.1 shows the principal parts of classes I-VI. Class VII, in Proto-Germanic,
formed its preterite by means of reduplication and ablaut. By the time of OE,
reduplication had been lost as an active process, though traces remained in some
verbs, and the ablaut had been greatly disturbed by various phonological and
morphological changes. The result was a veritable grab-bag of ablaut patterns,
which scholars still assign to the same class. Table 1.1 shows the principal parts
of two subclasses of Class VII, several of whose members have remained in the
language to the present day, and which are the subject of much of Chapter 3.
Though this system is the one traditionally used to describe OE, it is a better
description of Proto-Germanic, because of the phonological changes that by OE
had splintered several of the classes into subclasses. Additionally, morphological
variation occurred. Several members exhibited forms from different classes, and
6
Table 1.1: OE Strong Verb Classes
’drive’
’freeze’
’sing’
’bear’
’weave’
’contend’
’know’
’blossom’
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VIIa
VIIb
Infinitive
drīfan
frēosan
singan
beran
wefan
sacan
cnāwan
blōwan
Pret. sg.
drāf
frēas
sang
bær
wæf
sōc
cnēow
blēow
Pret. pl.
drifon
fruron
sungon
bǣron
wǣfon
sōcon
cnēowon
blēowon
Past Participle
drifen
froren
sungen
boren
wefen
sacen
cnāwen
blōwen
some 60 verbs exhibited weak forms, e.g. slēpade and slæpte, which are weak
preterites of the strong verb slǣpan. See Appendix I for a full list of OE strong
verb variation.
1.2.3
Middle English (1100-1500)
Beginning in late OE, the unstressed vowels in the final syllables became reduced
toward schwa or a schwa-like vowel. The inflectional endings of the OE strong verb
principal parts, namely <-an> for the infinitive, <-on> for the preterite plural,
and <-en> for the past participle, came to be written <-en> in ME, which I
represent, following Lass (1992: 78) as [-@n]. During ME, these final syllables were
lost entirely. In the case of sonorant-final verbal stems, the vowel was instead often
syncopated, even as early as OE, as in the adjective <gecorn> ’chosen’, which is
syncopated from gecoren. It is the syncopated participle that survives in PDE
sonorant-final strong verbs such as torn and sworn. Various other phonological
changes affected the ablauting vowel: descriptions of these changes are contained
within the dissertation wherever appropriate, especially in section 2 of Chapter 3,
7
and section 1 of Chapter 5.
During ME, the preterite singular and plural fell together, such that no strong
verb in PDE has more than three principal parts, as in drive ∼ drove ∼ driven.
In some cases, the participle also merged with the preterite, as in find ∼ found.
During ME, this process was ongoing. For these reasons, there is no separate
tradition of classification for ME strong verbs. Generally, the seven-class system
of Proto-Germanic and OE is used unchanged, as by Lass in CHEL (1992) and
Mossé in The Handbook of Middle English (1968). Fisiak (1968) attempts a classification in the most general terms, according to how many ablaut alternates a
verb displayed in a given century, but this can only be an approximate description
of ME verbs, as the number of alternates varied not only diachronically but also
diatopically.
The strong verbs of ME prove impossible to categorize in any specific way.
The records abound in not only chronological and dialectal variation, but also free
variation within a given text. Nearly every strong verb exhibits both strong and
weak past tense forms in ME, according to Welna (1996: 120). He lists all the
preterites and past participles he was able to turn up. Of the 157 strong verbs
in his databases, he records 17 for which he did not find weak past tenses. Of
those, my work with the Middle English Dictionary (MED) has turned up weak
past tenses, or mixed past tenses with both a vowel change and a dental suffix,
for 5, leaving 12 of the 157 verbs with no attestation of weak inflection during
ME. The verbs with no weak forms are bid, bide, bind, come, eat, find, shit, sing,
sling, stand, stride, and wind. Some of the 12, such as come, are highly frequent
and are exempt from the generalization that ME strong verbs exhibit weak forms,
but surprisingly frequent verbs also exhibit weak preterites, such as hōldede and
8
speked. Others that do not exhibit weak preterites are low frequency verbs that
have few forms attested. It may be assumed that at least some of these occurred
with weak forms in the spoken language that are not recorded because of the
paucity of attestation of these verbs.
1.3
1.3.1
Literature Survey
Bybee and Colleagues
Joan Bybee has written a great deal on the English strong and other irregular
or semi-regular verbs. The works used most relevant to the material studied in
this dissertation are Hooper (Joan Bybee Hooper 1976), Bybee and Slobin (1982),
Bybee and Moder (1983), Bybee and Newman (1995), and Bybee (2001). These
works argue for the important role of (1) type frequency, (2) token frequency,
(3) cue validity, and (4) product-oriented schemas in the evolution of irregular
morphology. It will be convenient to give here a definition of these terms, which
are employed often in later chapters.
The token frequency of a word or form is the number of instances in which it
occurs in the language. For example, in English, come is a verb of relatively high
token frequency, and wring is a verb of relatively low token frequency. The role of
token frequency in the preservation of irregular morphology was being developed
as early as the nineteenth century (Paul 1890). It has achieved a place in the
handbooks of historical linguistics as an important explanatory factor in language
change (e.g. Mańczak 1980). Work by Bybee and colleagues has supported the
token frequency hypothesis, according to which forms that are more frequent are
more likely to be conservative in their morphology. Token frequency is thus an
9
important factor in the preservation of strong inflection.
The type frequency of a pattern is the number of words that belong to that
pattern. For example, the type frequency of the ablaut pattern to which come
belongs is low, because only a single verb has [2] in the present and [ei] in the
past. In contrast, the type frequency of the pattern to which wring belongs is
high, because several verbs have the same ablaut pattern, e.g. sting, sling, cling,
fling. Type frequency is found by Bybee and colleagues to be most important
in the productivity of inflectional patterns, by which is meant the extension of a
pattern to words to which it did not originally apply. For example, the inflection
sting ∼ stung has been productive in English in extending to denominal verbs,
e.g. string, loanwords, e.g. sling, originally weak verbs, e.g. dig, and nonce words
created by researchers for linguistic experiments, e.g. spling, which was used by
Albright and Hayes (2003: 42) in an experiment that is described more fully in
section 1.3.3.
Cue validity is a measure of how well the presence of a feature predicts membership in a category. For example, the feature of possessing wings is a good
predictor of being a member of the avian category, but not a perfect predictor, as
not all winged objects are birds. Some, for example, are airplanes. Cue validity
can be applied to language by considering features such as whether a form ends in
a dental stop and categories such as preterite verb, and calculating to what extent
the presence of a final dental stop is a good predictor that a word is a preterite
verb, as opposed to, say, a noun, or present verb.
Bybee defines product-oriented schemas in contrast to generative source-oriented
rules. Using the verbs as an example, whereas generative rules specify how a
speaker shall alter a present to arrive at a preterite, a product-oriented schema
10
specifies the form a preterite shall take, without reference to the present. (Bybee
and Slobin 1982: 103) A source-oriented rule might state that the present of a
verb such as grow shall substitute /u/ for the vowel of the present tense, as in
example (1) below. A product-oriented schema might state that preterites shall
have a word-final /u/.
(1) Generating <-ew> preterites
V → /u/ / __#
A product-oriented schemas relies most crucially on phonological similarity.
Phonological similarity is defined by Bybee and Moder (1983) as a measure of
the number of features that two forms have in common. For example, sting is
phonologically similar to cling, sharing the sequence -ing. Each, however, is more
similar to sling than to each other. Cling and sling share the sequence -ling, and
sting and sling share -ing as well as an initial s-. The product-oriented schema that
produces the preterites for such verbs abstracts the similarities of the preterites
stung, slung, clung, and so forth, and specifies that preterites with that preterites
ending in -ung are well-formed, especially if they also begin with an s-.
1.3.2
Lieberman et al. 2007
Lieberman et al. gathered a list of 177 irregular OE verbs that are still present
in the lexicon of PDE. Of the 177, they classify 98 as still irregular in PDE.
Their selection of verbs to study is different than those listed in Huddleston and
Pullum (2002), as their study is diachronically rather than synchronically oriented.
Even in comparison with other diachronically oriented works, deciding whether to
11
include a verb can involve a judgment call. Sleep and read, for instance, had both
strong and weak forms in OE. Lieberman et al. classify sleep as irregular in OE
and read as regular, thereby excluding read from their study. In contrast, other
studies, e.g. Krygier (1994), exclude sleep from the OE strong verbs on the grounds
that it was predominantly weak, but deem that read had sufficiently many strong
forms to be included as an OE strong verb. As neither Krygier nor Lieberman et
al. relied on an OE corpus, the exact criteria for inclusion cannot be pinned down.
Forsake is listed by Lieberman et al. (2007 supp. 12) as irregular in ME and PDE,
but regular in OE. My search of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus shows that
the preterite singular was exclusively strong, forsacan ∼ forsōc, so I include it as
a verb strong in all periods, and moreover one that retained its inherited form.
Lieberman et al. used CELEX, a corpus of PDE constructed at the Dutch
Centre for Lexical Information (Baayen et al. 1995), to gather frequency data,
and organized the verbs into 6 different bins according to the logarithms of their
frequencies. They found that the lower the frequency of the bin, the higher the
percentage of verbs that had been regularized. They calculated the relative regularization rates of the verbs in each bin, and determined a “half-life” of verbs in
different bins.
The authors are not linguists, and, as noted above, linguists have made several
objections. Among them are those posted to the ANSAX listserv by Krygier. One
of his objections is their treatment of have as an irregular OE verb. In OE, habban
belonged to the third of the three classes of weak verbs. On the one hand, Class 3
comprised only four members, so in that sense habban may be considered irregular.
However, the irregularity that Lieberman et al. are considering is irregularity of
the past tense. The past tense of habban added the dental suffix to the root, which
12
is regular for a weak verb. The irregularity of the past tense of have, the loss of
the /v/ before the suffix, entered the language in ME. So it is at least disputable
whether the preterite of have can be considered irregular throughout the history
of English. Krygier also objects to their dismissal of frequency changes between
OE and PDE, pointing out that they report large changes in frequency for 10% of
their verbs. These changes, he says, are sufficient to warrant further investigation.
Fertig (2009) argued that many of the PDE verbs Lieberman et al. claim are
descended from OE strong verbs are actually the result of denominalization in
ME, or the merger of a strong and a weak verb, making the rate of regularization
of verbs less striking than Lieberman et al. report. Walk, which comes in part
from OE strong wealcan and in part from weak wealcian, is an example of a strong
and a weak verb falling together. The verb yelp, OE gielpan, had the meaning of
’to boast’, and all attested strong forms in ME have that meaning. Weak forms
have the meaning ’to utter a sharp and shrill cry’, which is the meaning of the
noun yelp, ’a sharp and shrill cry’. His conclusion is therefore that PDE weak yelp
comes not from OE strong gielpan, but is a denominal verb. Fertig also objects
to the one-sided view that looks only at morphological change in the direction
of regularization. He presents a number of regular verbs that have irregularized,
such as wear from OE weak werian, and argues that these irregularized verbs are
necessary to a balanced understanding of the history of English irregular verbs.
Fertig’s findings are covered in more detail in Chapter 5, section 4.1.
The article by Lieberman et al. is also limited by looking only at token frequency. They do not consider type frequency, nor phonological similarity, which
play a role in morphological development. Similar verbs are likely to be treated
similarly, which leads to developments that token frequency would not predict. As
13
other studies have shown, e.g. Hare and Elman (1995: 70), cling has always been
of low frequency, but it is less likely to become weak because of the many similar
verbs that conjugate alike.
1.3.3
Albright and Hayes 2003
In a path-breaking attempt to model the strong verbs, Albright and Hayes (2003)
ran computational implementations of the three models mentioned above. The
dual mechanism model attributes the production of regular past tenses to rule and
the production of irregular production to analogy (Prasada and Pinker 1993). The
connectionist model (Rumelhart and McClelland 1987) attributes the production
of all past tenses to analogy. The stochastic rule model attributes the production
of all past tenses to rules, with each rule weighted according to the frequency with
which it is employed in the verbal system. (Hayes and Albright 2003). A rule
that changes the past tense to -ung as in string ∼ strung, is more heavily weighted
than one that changes the past tense to -ame, as in come ∼ came.
Albright and Hayes compared the results of these models to experiments with
nonce words that they conducted on native speakers. In their study, the model
employing only stochastic rules yielded predictions that matched the results of
their experiments with native speakers more closely than either of the other two
models. Another important finding of their experiment was the role of phonological
similarity in determining the inflectional pattern of all verbs, including regulars.
They refer to the phonological features that correlate with a certain pattern as
“islands of reliability”. One example of an island of reliability for the regular weak
past tense are verbs that end in voiceless fricatives. All 352 verbs in Albright and
Hayes’ study ending in voiceless fricatives, such as miss, laugh, and wish, are weak.
14
Voiced fricatives do not form an island of reliability, as e.g. surprise is weak, while
rise is strong.
1.3.4
Hare and Elman 1995
Hare and Elman (1995) implemented a connectionist model and tested it using
the English strong and weak verbs. They used 106 OE strong verbs and 327 weak
verbs as their input, with token frequencies gathered from a concordance of OE
(di Paolo and Venezky 1980). These verbs were put through several iterations of
their connectionist learning model, representing generations of speakers learning
the language. The analogies made by the learning model were compared to the
analogies made by speakers in the actual history of the English strong verbs.
What they found was an overall tendency for verbs to regularize, with resistance
to regularization coming as a result of high token frequency or membership in
a class of high type frequency and phonological similarity. One of the strengths
of the paper is the use of multiple explanatory factors such as type and token
frequency, and phonological similarity, in contrast to works such as Krygier (1994)
and Lieberman et al. (2007), each of which is limited to the examination of a single
explanatory factor.
Challenges to the article have been raised. As mentioned above, Fertig (2009)
disagrees that the tendency toward regularization is as strong as Lieberman et al.
and Hare and Elman find. Instead he finds more of a balance between regularization and irregularization. Moreover, Hare and Elman do not consider change in
frequency over time to be significant enough to investigate. In contrast, the present
dissertation finds that in some cases the changes in frequency between Early Middle English (EME) and PDE are found to be significant. The most notable case
15
is those verbs with preterites ending in <-ew>, covered in Chapter 3, Therefore, I
consider it advantageous to use frequencies from corpora of two different periods
in the history of English. A more minor objection I have is to their treatments of
classes IV and V. The two classes are encoded in their model as having an equal
number of members, with the result that they changed members randomly. The
authors claim that this exchange of members occurred historically. In fact, Class
V had 28 members, while Class IV had 18. Despite this, the ultimate direction
of change was for Class V members to enter Class IV and adopt past tenses with
-o- rather than -e-. There are no verbs in PDE that inflect according to the Class
V pattern. I offer an explanation for this surprising behavior in Chapter 4, based
on the prevalence of long -o- throughout the strong verb system.
1.3.5
Krygier 1994
Krygier wrote a monograph entitled The Disintegration of the English Strong Verb
System (1994). The author’s goal is to study the strong verbs in OE and Middle
English (ME) and determine what factors contributed to the weakening of strong
verbs. He breaks down ME into several periods, according to century, and also
treats the usage of individual authors such as Chaucer and Malory in separate
chapters. The chapters contain the inflectional pattern of each strong verb attested
in that period or author. These strong verb patterns are followed by a list of
all strong verbs with a weak preterite attested that has turned up in Krygier’s
corpus and grammar search. Verbs with a weak preterite are described as having
undergone the “shift” from strong to weak. Krygier then categorizes the “shifted”
verbs according to their stem-final consonants; whether they end in a sonorant, a
dental, a labial, etc. Chi-square tests are used to determine whether any of those
16
features is prominent among shifted verbs in a statistically significant way. If the
p-value for a feature is less than .1, he concludes that that feature was a significant
factor in the “shift” during that period.
Krygier’s work is the first attempt to put the study of the history of the
strong verbs on a solid quantitative basis. However, the statistics he carries out
ignore tokens and focus only on whether or not a verb has an attested a weak
preterite, regardless of whether it is rare or abundant in use. The absence of
token frequency from his study is a consequence of a reliance on grammars rather
than corpora. Even when Krygier gathered data from an author such as Chaucer,
he proceeded without taking token frequency into account. Token frequency has
long been understood to be a very important factor in the loss or survival of
inflectional patterns, at least as far back as Hermann Paul in 1890. Hooper (1976)
had already done a survey of several originally strong verbs in English and found
a correlation between the preservation or loss of their strong inflection with their
token frequency. Even if token frequency was not meant to be the focus of Krygier’s
monograph, its importance was worth acknowledging in some way.
Additionally, as is reflected in the use of the word “disintegration” in the title, the premise of the work is that the strong verbs, which had formed a robust
and stable system in OE, were “on the path to oblivion” (194) by the end of the
14th century. This premise informs the methodology, according to which Krygier
treats any strong verb exhibiting a weak preterite as having undergone the “shift”
from strong to weak, as though it were fated to be exclusively weak henceforth.
However, as noted, nearly every strong verb acquired a weak preterite in ME, yet
many of them are exclusively strong today. This is where the absence of token
frequency is a serious shortcoming: a verb with many strong preterites but a few
17
weak preterites in a corpus is indistinguishable from a verb with predominantly
weak preterites. Yet we would expect different outcomes for them: the former
is more likely to remain strong than the latter. To take an example at random,
Thomas Malory uses the preterite growed, so Krygier treats grow as having undergone the “shift” from strong to weak. However, in the standard PDE which is
the object of the present dissertation’s study, grew is the only preterite used, thus
undermining the idea that grew was on the path to oblivion. For this reason, I
prefer to describe the ME strong verb system not in terms of disintegration, but
in terms of variability. The only review of Krygier (1994) that I have turned up
(Nielsen 1997) deplores Krygier’s lack of access to computerized OE corpora, but
concludes that it would not have made a final difference to the work. Nielsen
does not find any fault with the treatment of ME verbs as “shifted” rather than
“fluctuating”.
1.3.6
Long 1944
Long’s The English Strong Verb from Chaucer to Caxton (1944), the author’s New
York University dissertation, is a reference work cataloguing all occurrences of
strong verb forms in a fifteenth century corpus that the author searched manually.
It is an invaluable resource for determining what forms were attested during that
period and in what texts. Its shortcoming lies in the fact that it does not provide
token frequency data in full. Instead, it records one instance of each form in each
text, with no indication of whether a form occurs many times in a text or only
once. As this is primarily intended as a reference, the author makes few analytic
claims, consisting mostly of statements about the probable source of one analogy
or another.
18
1.3.7
Summary
Previous work on the strong verbs comes in various flavors: reference works,
learning models, investigation of the factors underlying diachronic change, and
synchronic psycholinguistic investigation of the way past tenses are processed.
Different factors for the preservation and loss of strong verb inflection have been
proposed, the most prominent of which are token frequency, type frequency, and
phonological similarity. Certain gaps in the literature exist, and this dissertation
seeks to fill some of them. Two of the works discussed above, Krygier (1994) and
Lieberman et al. (2007), consider only one explanatory factor each: phonological
similarity and token frequency, respectively. The present dissertation emphasizes
the importance of considering multiple factors to do justice to the complexity of
language. Each of the next four chapters of the dissertation considers a different
factor, and the final chapter brings them together into a quantitative model.
Much diachronic work on the history of English verbs has been carried out
without using the full array of theoretical linguistic tools, e.g. Krygier (1994),
Lieberman et al. (2007), Hogg (1988), Welna (1991). The primary interest of much
of the current linguistic research on the strong verbs, e.g. Bybee and colleagues,
Pinker and colleagues (Prasada and Pinker 1993; Pinker 1999), Rumelhart and
McClelland (1987), Albright and Hayes (2003), has been psycholinguistics rather
than language change.
The present dissertation, like Hare and Elman (1995), seeks to unite studies of
the history of the English language with recent findings of theoretical lingustics.
It differs from all these works, both synchronically and diachronically oriented,
in using multiple corpora from different historical periods, rather than dismissing
changes in frequency as insignificant. This allows a more nuanced approach with
19
attention to detail for individual verbs, in keeping with the philological training
of the author.
1.4
Methodology and Explanatory Factors
In OE, there were approximately 367 strong verbs (Welna 1991: 131). Many of
these no longer exist in any form in the language, having undergone lexical loss.
The purpose of this dissertation is to study these verbs that remain in the PDE
lexicon and identify the factors that contributed to the survival of OE strong
inflection in some but not in others. Toward this end, new data are presented.
The authors of previous work on the subject have not had as many historical
resources available to them, and even those who used historical corpora, used only
one corpus. I have used multiple corpora for different purposes, and two corpora
from different periods for gathering the frequencies of the entire set of strong verbs.
I seek both to test existing hypotheses, such as the token frequency hypothesis,
as well as to propose new ideas. The role of vowel quantity as a factor in the
history of strong verbs is a new suggestion. The role of phonological similarity as
a factor has been established in the literature, but the proposal that the survival
of the <-ew> preterites correlates with the phonological similarity of the verbs
is innovative. These factors are evaluated qualitatively and also quantitatively
in Chapter 6, using a linear regression model. The use of the model allows for
statistical evaluation of the significance of the proposed factors.
The general prediction for survival or loss of strong inflection, according to the
token frequency hypothesis, is that analogical leveling affects low frequency items
first, and items of high token frequency are likely to retain irregular inflection. The
20
fact that token frequency has a significant effect on the loss and survival of irregular
inflection are well documented, and have been discussed in the literature since the
nineteenth century (Paul 1890). The methodology of this dissertation is to consider
the development of the strong verbs first in light of the token frequency hypothesis,
expanding on previous research by using multiple corpora from different periods,
and then to seek to explain exceptions to the general rule.
The token frequencies for each of the strong verbs are gathered from CELEX,
a corpus of PDE, and the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), a
corpus of Early Middle English. Both corpora are tagged for part of speech and for
lemma, making the counts optimally precise. The verbs are organized into classes
and subclasses along the lines of the seven-class OE system discussed in section
1.2.2 of this introduction. Tables are presented for each subclass with the EME and
PDE frequency counts, sorted in a way that allows the reader to eyeball whether
a greater proportion of the verbs that retained their strong inflection are the more
frequent verbs, at the top of the table, or not. Cases where frequency predicts
survival of strong inflection are identified, as are exceptions where frequency is
not such a good predictor. For example, the high frequency of come correctly
predicts the preservation of its strong inflection, while the high frequency of help
incorrectly predicts that it should be strong in PDE, when it is weak.
Some of the exceptions can be accounted for by word shape and cue validity,
which have a statistically significant correlation with the development of strong
inflection. Features related to word shape, such as “initial consonant cluster” and
“final -ng”, are calculated to see to what extent they predict membership in the
class of strong verb preterite. The two major subclasses where a correlation is
observed are 1) verbs that end in final nasals and velars, such as sing ∼ sang
21
∼ sung, and 2) verbs with preterites that end in -ew, such as grow. One of the
contributions of this dissertation is the hypothesis that initial consonant clusters
are a feature that promoted the preservation of strong inflection.
Vowel quantity is another factor argued to have played an important role in
the outcome of strong verb preterites, with manifold proposed effects. Verbs that
did not have long vowels anywhere in their paradigm were more likely to become
weak. This is the explanation proposed for the weak outcome of help. If a strong
verb had alternate past tense forms in ME, it was likely to select one that had
a long vowel. If multiple past tenses with long vowels for a single verb existed,
the one with a long open o, /O:/, was selected in Early Modern English (EMnE).
Two explanations of the importance of vowel quantity are presented. One posits
that long vowels tended to flourish because they enjoyed a numerical dominance
that was both interparadigmatic and intraparadigmatic, so that the spread of long
vowels gathered momentum. The other posits that long vowels in strong preterites
also offered the listener an inherent perceptual advantage over short vowels.
Chapter 5 departs from the strict exclusion of verbs that were not strong in OE
by looking at the effects of word shape, type frequency, and token frequency on all
dental-final verbs. Two dental preterite allomorphs, the one that underlies PDE
-ed, as in thread ∼ threaded and the one that underlies the null suffix, as in hit ∼
hit, have been in competition since OE. The former is now the default, whereas
the latter was the default for dental-final weak verbs in OE. Word shape is argued
to have begun to shift the scales to a preference for the -ed variant, and its type
frequency eventually snowballed into the dominant allomorph. Token frequency is
argued to have governed which individual verbs retained a preterite without the
extra syllable.
22
All the factors are then combined into a single mathematical model of the
strong verbs using linear regression. The dental-final weak verbs are again excluded. The model computes the weights for the different factors, which is innovative in the treatment of the history of strong verbs. It is hoped that future work,
by the author and by other scholars, will both refine the model and contribute
new factors to be tested.
1.5
Scope
The primary thrust of this dissertation is morphological, focusing on the selection
of verbal preterites from among competing forms. Morphophonology is taken into
account where relevant. Syntax is beyond the scope of the work, and semantics is
referred to only when a verb behaves aberrantly in a way that appears to result
from following the example of a semantically similar verb.
Verbs such as niman ‘take’, which no longer exist in English, are excluded.
Some of the remaining verbs are strong in PDE, such as come. Some are weak,
such as help. Others have mixed inflections, such as crow, which has the preterites
crew and crowed. These strong, weak, and mixed verbs are included as objects of
this study. Obtaining a precise count of how many are strong and how many are
weak depends on one’s principles of categorization. To count as strong for this
dissertation, a verb must have a current strong preterite, which may or may not
be in competition with a weak preterite. A strong past participle, e.g. mown,
is not sufficient to qualify a verb as strong, if a strong preterite, such as mew,
no longer exists. Moreover, a verb that lost its strong inflection, and only some
centuries later obtained a strong inflection, with no continuity between the OE
23
strong inflection and the PDE strong inflection, counts as a verb that became
weak rather than one that remained strong. An example is shit, whose inherited
preterite from OE would have been shote, but this form was lost in favor of a weak
preterite. Only in the nineteenth century is shat recorded, by analogy with sat.
In contrast, verbs that remained mostly strong throughout their history count as
strong, even if their current strong preterite is not a continuation of its OE form.
Fly had a preterite fleah in OE, and its PDE preterite flew arose through analogy
with blew, knew, etc. Because fly was never predominantly weak, it is classified as
retaining strong inflection.
Verbs excluded from this study include auxiliaries, originally weak verbs, and
most verbs that in PDE employ dual strategies for marking the preterite, using
both a dental suffix and a vowel change, such as buy ∼ bought and keep ∼ kept.
Only verbs that are descended from OE strong verbs are the focus of this study,
except, as noted above, the treatment of dental-final weak verbs in Chapter 5.
The dissertation also restricts itself with respect to the dialectal diversity of
English strong verbs, both synchronic and diachronic. Wakelin (1977: 122-24)
lists a number of patterns that PDE dialects display with respect to strong verb
morphology. Many strong verbs that have not become weak in the standard,
prestige dialects of English have become weak in other dialects, with preterites
and past participles such as drinked, stealed, seed, gived, comed. These verbs also
exhibit dually marked forms, with a vowel change and a suffix in the preterite
or past participle, e.g. drunked, stoled, wored. The reverse phenomenon is also
seen: verbs that have become weak in standard English but remain strong in
other dialects, such as crope, holp, and washen. The zero-marked preterite is
not limited to dental-final strong verbs such as hit in some dialects, but is also
24
extended to other verbs such as begin, see, and come. Still other verbs retain
archaic strong preterites such as spak and gav. Moving backward in time, it was
noted in section 1.2.3 that ME exhibited a wide range of variation as well. Nearly
every strong verb displayed a weak preterite. In addition, many verbs exhibited
a great variety of strong preterites. Some of these are only orthographic variants,
while others reflect real differences in the pronunciation. Wash, for example, has 5
weak preterite singular forms listed in the MED, and 32 strong preterite singular
forms.
This diversity of dialectal forms is too great to encompass in a single work,
though a study of dialectal variation would be of interest and a valuable line of research to pursue in further work. The present dissertation, therefore, is focused on
the standard prestige dialects of standard American English as exemplified in the
American Heritage Dictionary, a dictionary that attempts to be conservative. As
such, it considers mainly such ME forms as contributed to the standard American
English dialect. On occasion, an explanation of forms outside this purview follows
naturally from the arguments being advanced. For example, an explanation of
the spread in the northern dialect of the Class III preterite fand follows from the
explanation of the spread in the west of the preterite fund. Thus both are given,
but no attempt is made at a comprehensive explanation of all northern forms.
1.6
Sources
A major contribution of the present work is the use of digitized, searchable historical corpora from all periods, including the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the
York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, the Linguistic Atlas
25
of Early Middle English, the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Middle and Early
Modern English, and CELEX. The data obtained therefrom will be of use to other
scholars.
The Dictionary of Old English Corpus contains every extant text from OE.
It is invaluable in that respect. However, it is not tagged for grammatical or
lexical information, so homographs make some searches impossible. For example,
searching for <æt>, the strong preterite of etan ‘eat’, turns up more than 6,000
hits, the majority of which are the preposition æt ‘at’. The York-Toronto-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, as its title indicates, is tagged for grammatical
information, which reduces some of the confusion among forms, though not all,
due to confusion among similar lexical items. However, it includes only a subset
of the prose texts of OE, meaning that some of the searches that would yield
results in the complete corpus give no hits for the smaller corpus. LAEME, the
Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, which covers a subset of the extant texts
between 1150 and 1325, is the corpus from which most of the historical token
frequency data in this work have been taken. It is tagged extensively for both
grammatical and lexical information, meaning that searches may be carried out
with optimal speed and accuracy. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Middle
and Early Modern English contains a selection of texts from 1150 to 1710. They
are tagged for grammatical information, but not lexical. CELEX was used for the
PDE frequencies. It is tagged for both grammatical and lexical information.
Different corpora are therefore suitable for different purposes. LAEME and
CELEX are suitable for gathering frequencies for large sets of verbs. The Dictionary of Old English Corpus is useful when one would like the frequencies from
the entire extant corpus of OE, and is suitable for gathering frequencies for small
26
sets of verbs without many homographs. The Penn-Helsinki corpora are useful for
breaking the Middle and Early Modern periods down into centuries and pinpointing changes with greater chronological precision.
Previous works have not had access to all of these corpora. Krygier (1994)
relied on grammars rather than corpora, except corpora of single authors or
manuscripts—the AB manuscript, the Peterborough chronicle, Chaucer, and Malory. Albright and Hayes (2003), Bybee, and Lieberman et al (2007). studied
only PDE. Hare and Elman (1995)used the Old English Concordance (di Paolo
Healey and Venezky 1980), which is a concordance of the most frequent words in
OE. Long (1944) investigated a sizable corpus, but being compelled to do so by
hand, was able to study only a single century. LAEME became available only in
2008, and this dissertation is one of the first works to make use of this invaluable
resource for EME.
27
Chapter 2
Frequency
2.1
Introduction
This chapter examines the strong verbs in light of the frequency hypothesis. According to the frequency hypothesis, words with higher token frequency are more
conservative in their morphology. I draw heavily on the works of Bybee and colleagues2 for approaches to frequency studies, though the importance of frequency is
not limited to a single linguistic model. Optimality Theory, for example, has been
extended to include constraints that are weighted according to token frequency3 .
The model used in the present work can be summarized as follows. High frequency forms are more likely to be conservative in their morphology. They are
stored more vividly in speakers’ memories, and can be summoned up more readily. Less frequent members are less likely to be conservative in their morphology,
because the inherited form is more likely to be forgotten. If the inherited form
is more difficult to retrieve, the form is likely to be generated according to the
most prominent and relevant pattern in the grammar. Prominence is the result
28
of type frequency: the number of distinct words that exhibit a certain pattern. A
pattern such as come ∼ came has many tokens, but only one type, and is thus
not prominent as a pattern. Relevance is the result of phonological similarity to
the members of that pattern. The pattern cling ∼ clung has high type frequency
and has thus been applied to several verbs, such as dig ∼ dug, a verb that was
originally weak, and fling ∼ flung, borrowed from a Norse weak verb. However, if
a speaker is having difficulty retrieving the past tense of shrive, the lack of similarity between shrive and the members of the cling ∼ clung pattern means that
neither shruv nor shrung is a likely possibility.
Bybee and colleagues have focused on the importance of token frequency for
survival and type frequency and phonological similarity for productivity. The
present work emphasizes in addition the cases where items of low frequency are
susceptible to the factors that govern productivity. This is not a new concept, but
applications of it in several cases will be new.
This chapter presents the token frequency data for the strong verbs, from Early
Middle English (EME) and from Present Day English (PDE). The choice of periods
was governed partially by theoretical reasons and partly by convenience. Because
the purpose of this work is to explain the inflectional outcomes of originally strong
verbs in PDE, data from PDE should be included. Because the approach is historical, data from an earlier period or periods should be included. Hare and Elman
(1995) found little change in the frequencies of strong verbs between Old English
(OE) and Middle English (ME). For this reason, the payoff for including multiple
historical periods was judged not to be significant enough to warrant the time and
effort that would be required. The minor fluctuations in frequencies between OE
and EME, between EME and (Late Middle English) LME, and between LME and
29
EMnE are not usually distinguishable from chance, given the nature of the data.
For PDE frequencies, the CELEX corpus was used, and accessed using the online
WebCelex site (Baayen et al. 1995).
EME was chosen as the source for historical data largely because of the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), recently made available online.
LAEME greatly facilitates corpus studies by being not only tagged for grammatical information but also lemmatized. The great variability in spelling in ME makes
corpora without lemmatization, such as the Penn-Helsinki corpora, less easy to
extract frequency data for strong verbs from, though it is an invaluable resource
for historical syntax.
Using EME makes sense for linguistic reasons as well. The OE corpus exhibits
some variation in strong verb inflection, both in the interchange of members among
strong verb classes, and in the occasional weak form of a strong verb. The full
list of strong verbs with weak forms is given in Appendix 1. In ME, nearly every
strong verb acquired a weak preterite in addition to its strong preterites (Welna
1996: 120), and the variation in strong preterites increased with the passing of
time. Reduction of the distinction between the 1st and 3rd preterite singular and
the plural and 2nd singular preterite was also ongoing. All preterites were the
process of being collapsed under a single principal part during ME. Significant
changes in semantics and confusion among verbs also emerged, particularly in the
falling together of strong and weak parallels. EME is the period most chronologically removed from PDE that still exhibits much of the variety in which we are
interested.
In this chapter, the verbs are organized according to the standard seven OE
classes. No real organization for ME strong verbs exists, due to the extent of
30
the inflectional variation, yet there are clear cases where PDE verbs are conservative because of the existence of many other similar verbs with the same pattern
throughout their history. The OE system, being straightforward, provides a starting point for analyzing the behavior of strong verbs that act in families. In cases
where the ME verbs have departed from any possibility of being organized along
OE lines, the ease of presentation is still valuable, and the differences between OE
and ME are discussed as they arise.
This chapter identifies cases where the frequency hypothesis holds, and cases
where it does not. The latter are the cases where further explanation is needed.
They are the subject of the rest of the dissertation. The frequencies given, unless
otherwise specified, represent the total number of verbal forms in the corpus. For
the LAEME corpus, the total was obtained by searching for all tags beginning with
<v>. In the CELEX corpus, the total was obtained by searching for verbs for
which the value in the the column “Class” is <V>. In all cases, prefixed forms are
included on the assumption that, for example, forgot contributes to the survival
of got, and vice versa. In two cases, only a prefixed form survives in PDE: begin
and forsake, for the original roots gin and sake are no longer independent verbs.
In the appendix, the frequencies of verbs are broken down into present, preterite,
and participle.
2.2
Class I verbs
31
Table 2.1: Class I Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
S
W
S
S
S
S
S
W
W
W
W
W
S
S
W
S/W
S/W
W
Verb
rise
write
bide
drive
ride
smite
shrive
shine
bite
glide
gripe
spew
slide
strike
stride
writhe
cleave
shit
whine
LAEME
frequency
357
242
228
185
128
127
84
61
50
48
34
26
22
13
7
7
7
1
0
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
S
S
S
W
W
S
W
W
W
W
S/W
S
W
W
W
S
32
Verb
write
rise
drive
strike
shine
ride
slide
bite
stride
writhe
glide
whine
bide
cleave
smite
shit
spew
gripe
shrive
CELEX
frequency
8412
4574
3908
1999
1625
1072
637
494
236
130
116
116
97
75
58
42
41
12
6
For the present discussion, shit and cleave are omitted. Shit permits the
preterites shit, shitted, and shat, and cleave permits the preterites cleaved, cleft,
and clove. Shit is treated as weak in this dissertation, because the original strong
preterite, shote, was lost from the language. It is not possible to connect this loss
directly with the low attestation of the verb from the written corpora, however.
One assumes a priori that the written attestation does not adequately reflect the
spoken attestation, because of the taboo nature of shit. Inadequate written attestation may be the case among many verbs, but shit is one case where it can safely
be assumed. The preterites shat and shitted are treated in further detail in the
discussion of dental-final verbs in Chapter 5. Cleave is a philologically complicated
verb, representing the confusion of three OE verbs: Class I strong verb clīfan ‘adhere’, Class 2 weak verb clifian/clēofian ‘adhere’, and Class II strong verb clēofan
‘split’.
Leaving aside those two verbs, then, there are 9 verbs with strong outcomes:
drive, ride, rise, shine, shrive, smite, stride, strike, and write, and 8 verbs with
weak outcomes: bide, bite, glide, gripe, slide, spew, whine, and writhe. Of the
verbs that became weak, bite and slide later underwent the regular operation of
phonological changes, giving them past tenses that are synchronically strong in
PDE. See Chapter 5 for discussion of vowel shortening in weak preterites and the
effects on dental-final verbs. They are here treated as weak, in order to test the
hypothesis about morphology, viz. that verbs of sufficiently low frequency lost
their strong preterites in favor of weak preterites. Later phonological changes are
a separate problem.
The frequency hypothesis says that the 9 verbs at the top of the frequency
chart should have come out strong and the 8 verbs at the bottom of the chart
33
should have come out weak. In the LAEME data, the exceptions are bide, strike,
and stride. Bide is the third most frequent of the verbs in Table 2.1, with an
absolute frequency of 228, so it is expected to be strong, yet it is weak in PDE. In
contrast, strike appears near the bottom of the LAEME verbs in the table, with
a frequency of only 13, so it is expected to be weak. Stride has a frequency of
7 in LAEME, yet it too is strong in PDE. In the CELEX data, bide and strike
conform to expectations, suggesting that a change in frequency was responsible
for the weakening of bide, with an absolute frequency of 97, and the preservation
of the strong preterite of strike, with an absolute frequency of 1999. Stride more
or less conforms to expectations in the CELEX data, given that no verb above it
is synchronically weak in PDE. Slide and bite, historically weak, have become of
sufficiently high frequency that their preterites slid and bit have not been replaced
with slided and bited. Thus, the list of CELEX verbs from write, at the top,
down to stride, consists entirely of synchronically strong verbs of relatively high
frequency.
Another crux faces us with strike, which has as its preterite not the expected
stroke, but struck. The form struck comes from analogy with Class III verbs such
as string ∼ strung. The Class III verbs are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
Bybee and Moder (1983) treat them in terms of family resemblances. According
to the theory of family resemblances, there exists a set of features pertaining to
the class. It is not necessary for a verb in the class to have all the features,
but it must share at least some features with other members of the class. The
relevant features found by Bybee and Moder for Class III include an initial /s/,
an initial consonant cluster, a nasal in the coda, and a velar in the coda. Strike
shares all of these features except the nasal, and thus it was a good potential
34
candidate for joining this class. Hogg (1988) wrote on struck and concluded much
the same, using different terminology. In the process he rejected, correctly, the ad
hoc phonological explanation of Ekwall (1975) according to which /stro:k/ became
/stru:k/, which then shortened and lowered to /str2k/. See Hogg for the difficulties
of that explanation. I am not, however, in agreement with his idea that avoidance
of homophony with stroke is a plausible factor. The preterites of drive, ride, rise,
and write are homophonous with the nouns drove, road, rose, and rote. Contrary
to his explanation of avoidance of homophony in this class, the OED suggests
that homophony with the noun abode may have been partially responsible for the
survival of the preterite abode into the nineteenth century, after the loss of the
preterite bode. There is no need to postulate avoidance of homophony in the case
of strike, because it fits so well the criteria for membership in Class III, and is the
only verb of Class I to do so.
The frequency hypothesis predicts that shrive and smite, which are the strong
verbs of the lowest frequency in CELEX, are expected to be among the next to
become weak. Their formerly high frequencies account for the fact that they have
not yet entirely become weak. They originally had high frequencies—respectively
84 and 127 in LAEME. Therefore, ME speakers had less difficulty retrieving shrove
and smote than with the preterites of verbs that were less frequent at the time.
They thus produced shrived and smited less often than they would have, if shrive
and smite had been less frequent. Shrove and smote were therefore relatively salient
as preterites in recent history, and they remained at least somewhat accessible to
speakers longer than verbs of lower frequency. Overall, the verbs of Class I support
the frequency hypothesis, especially when both EME and PDE frequencies are
taken into account.
35
2.3
Class II verbs
The Class II strong verbs of OE that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive
into PDE are bid, brew, brook, bow, choose, chew, cleave, creep, dive, flee, fly,
sneeze, freeze, lie4 , reek, rue, shoot, shove, seethe, sprout, sup. The form sneeze
arose following the disappearance of fnēosan from the spoken language in favor
of neeze. According to the OED, the form sneeze with initial /s/ may have been
a result of the misinterpretation of <nese> in the written language, if <> was
incorrectly taken as <f>. Since sneeze is descended directly from fnēosan, it is
included in this list, though its history is very unusual and borders on calling for
exclusion due to lexical loss. However, Craig Melchert, in an email communication,
suggested to me an alternative explanation: the influence of other verbs with snthat refer to noises made by humans with the nose as well as the mouth: snore,
snarl, sniff, snuff(le). Table 2.2 shows the LAEME frequences of Class II verbs
and their preterites.
36
Table 2.2: Class II Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
W
S
W
W
S/W
S
W
W?
W
W
W
S/W
W
W
W
W
W
S
S/W
W
W
Verb
flee
choose
bow
lie
bid
fly
rue
shoot
brook
creep
chew
cleave
shove
seethe
brew
sprout
sup
freeze
dive
reek
sneeze
LAEME
frequency
249
194
144
130
124
120
105
64
38
31
24
22
17
14
8
7
5
5
2
1
0
PDE
outcome
S
S
W?
S
W
W
W
S/W
W
W
S/W
W
W
W
W
S/W
W
W
W
W
W
37
Verb
choose
fly
shoot
freeze
flee
creep
lie
bid
chew
bow
dive
shove
sprout
brew
seethe
cleave
sneeze
reek
sup
brook
rue
CELEX
frequency
3211
1719
1360
807
482
466
401
389
361
279
225
215
126
107
86
75
58
46
22
18
9
Once again, cleave, which reflects the confusion of three OE verbs, is omitted.
Similarly bid, which represents the confusion of Class II bēodan and Class V biddan. Dive results from a fusion of Class II dūfan and weak difian, and it became
weak. From the nineteenth century, dive also acquired the strong preterite dove
by analogy with Class I verbs such as drive, and both strong and weak preterites
are prominent in PDE. Nineteen verbs are left, of which only three or four are
strong. The verb of dubitable outcome is shoot. According to the OED (s.v.
shoot), the preterite shot may derive from the weak verb scotian, or it may have
been influenced by the strong past participle shotten. It may also derive, via
vowel-shortening before a dental, from the ME preterite shōte, which may derive
from the strong preterite scēat. In fact, as the OED states, all of these may have
contributed to the PDE form shot. Omitting shoot, eighteen verbs are left, of
which three are strong. This represents a survival rate of one in six verbs, or 17%.
Compare the 50% survival rate of Class I verbs.
This state of affairs can be explained partly by the lower frequency of the Class
II verbs as well as by their lower phonological coherence. The average frequency of
all the Class I verbs is 1244, and the average frequency of all the Class II verbs is
498, somewhat less than half. The higher absolute frequency of the Class I verbs
contributed to their conservative behavior. Turning to phonological coherence, we
see that nearly all the Class I verbs had /i:/ in the present and a coda that was
resistent to phonological change. In contrast, the Class II verbs exhibited more
variety already in OE, and the variety was exacerbated by ME sound laws. In
OE, the vowel of the present might be <ēo> /eo/ or <ū> /u:/. The reasons
for the difference are unrecoverable, but some analogy with Class I verbs may be
responsible (Hogg 1988: 153). ME diphthongizations affected all verbs that had
38
ended in /g/ or /w/, resulting in changes to the present and preterite of bow, brew,
chew, flee, fly, lie, and rue. Moreover, though the regular outcome of OE /eo/
was /e:/, an alternate outcome /O:/ was also found. The former is represented
in freeze and the latter in choose. Thus, of the three Class II verbs that remain
fully strong, no two are alike. Freeze and choose have the inherited preterite but
dissimilar presents, and fly acquired its preterite flew by analogy with Class VII
verbs such as grow. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of fly, as well as of the
related verb flee.
The correlation of the low survival rate of the Class II verbs with their low
phonological coherence suggests that phonological coherence is important for survival. Bybee and colleagues focus on the role of token frequency in survival and on
phonological coherence for productivity, but the disintegration of Class II provides
one of several cases in the present work that indicates the overlap of survival and
productivity. Aside from bide, the verbs from LAEME the top of Table I consistently remained strong down to a frequency of 61. Verbs of significantly higher
frequency in Table 2.2, such as flee, bow, lie, and rue, are weak.
Another interesting observation on relative frequency and survival is that
choose, fly, and flee, the verbs that remain strong, are scattered throughout the
LAEME column, but concentrated near the top of the CELEX column. The implication is that either the texts in LAEME reflect poorly the actual frequencies
of fly and especially freeze, or that the frequencies increased early enough for the
strong preterites to be preserved.
39
2.4
Class III Verbs
The Class III strong verbs can be divided into three sub-classes. The first subclass, here called Class IIIa, following Krygier, includes verbs that ended in a
nasal followed by another consonant. The verbs of that subclass that did not
undergo lexical loss and that survive into PDE are bind, burn, climb, cling, drink,
find, fling, (be)gin, grind, run, shrink, sink, sing, slink, sling, spin, spring, stink,
sting, swim, swing, wind, win, wring. The second sub-class, here called Class IIIb,
includes verbs that ended in a liquid followed by another consonant. The verbs
of that subclass that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive into PDE are
bark, carve, delve, yield, yelp, help, melt, mourn, smart, spurn, starve, swallow,
swell, swerve, warp. The third sub-class, here called Class IIIc, includes verbs
that originally belonged to Class V, but transferred to Class III after a dental
element was added to the end (Wright 1954: 269). The verbs of that subclass
that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive into PDE are burst, braid, fight,
and thresh/thrash. Burn and run are the results of mergers of two verbs each,
with each verb subject to metathesis. Burn results from Class III strong brinnan
and weak bærnan. Run results from Class III rinnan and ME rinnen/rennen
from ON rinna/renna. For a more detailed history of the metathesized forms and
the development of burn and run, see the OED. Also subject to metathesis were
burst and thresh/thrash. Tables 2.3 through 2.5 show the LAEME and CELEX
frequencies for Class III verbs.
40
Table 2.3: Class IIIa Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
S
W
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
W
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
Verb
(be)gin
find
sing
bind
burn
run
win
drink
stink
spring
sting
wind
wring
grind
sink
swim
climb
cling
sling
swing
shrink
spin
slink
fling
LAEME
frequency
938
806
393
285
2615
225
211
183
106
104
56
46
31
28
23
22
18
11
5
3
2
2
0
0
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
S
S
W
W
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
41
Verb
find
(be)gin
run
win
drink
climb
burn
sing
swing
sink
swim
spring
grind
cling
spin
fling
shrink
wind
bind
sting
wring
stink
slink
sling
CELEX
frequency
19525
12254
7970
2762
2321
1643
1577
1407
1001
894
837
603
491
489
458
425
364
323
321
151
120
72
30
30
Table 2.4: Class IIIb Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
Verb
LAEME
frequency
help
300
yield
223
warp
214
swallow 53
mourn 47
carve
36
starve
34
melt
31
yelp
30
delve
27
smart
22
swell
17
bark
9
spurn
2
swerve 0
PDE
outcome
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
Verb
CELEX
frequency
help
6956
swallow 594
melt
436
starve
364
carve
350
yield
329
swell
270
bark
181
mourn 110
swerve 73
warp
57
spurn
44
smart
30
delve
28
yelp
21
Table 2.5: Class IIIc Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
W
W
W
Verb
fight
burst
braid
thresh/thrash
LAEME
frequency
146
57
57
8
PDE
outcome
S
W
W
W
Verb
fight
burst
thresh/thrash
braid
CELEX
frequency
2554
682
180
60
Members of Class IIIa almost universally retained their strong inflection, members of Class IIIb lost their strong inflection, and members of Class IIIc retained
or lost strong inflection in accordance with token frequency. Behaving according
to token frequency is the exception for Class III. For Class IIIa, it is apparent that
class size and phonological similarity among members was crucial for survival,
just as it was for the extension of the pattern to other verbs. The phonological
42
similarity of Class IIIa verbs is treated at greater length in Chapter 3. When
the preterite of a low frequency verb such as shrink was produced, the inherited
form was difficult or impossible to retrieve. Because shrink fit a common ablaut
pattern, its inherited preterite was generated in cases where it might not have
been frequent enough to summon from memory. Had it not belonged to such a
common pattern, we can expect that its inherited preterite might have been lost.
It is worth noting that the two weak verbs, burn and climb, are the most
dissimilar to the others. Climb underwent lengthening of the vowel in the present,
causing it to resemble verbs such as bind, but the final stop was lost in the reduction
of /mb/ clusters, causing climb to resemble neither sing nor bind. When the
Elizabethans attempted to generate an archaic strong preterite for climb, they did
not use the Class III verbs as their model, indicating that they did not find it
similar enough to be a member. In keeping with the argument that productivity
and survival are related, part of the reason clamb/clomb did not survive was lack
of support from other members. Fusion with a weak counterpart played a role in
the weakening of burn, but other verbs fused with weak counterparts and retained
strong preterites. One such verb seen above was cleave, which retains clove as one
of its preterite variants. Subsequent to the metathesis of vowel and liquid, burn
had a coda ending in a liquid + consonant, which no longer resembled Class IIIa
verbs. Moreover, burn came to resemble Class IIIb verbs, which, like Class IIIa
verbs, do not conform to the frequency hypothesis. In this case, they all became
weak, irrespective of frequency. Chapter 4 deals in further detail with the verbs
ending in liquid + consonant clusters and proposes a hypothesis based on vowel
quantity for the loss of the strong preterites.
43
2.5
Class IV and V
Most verbs in classes IV and V had identical ablaut except for the past participle,
where Class IV had /o/ and Class V had /e/. In OE and ME, members of one
class freely adopted the participial vowel of the other. In EME, Class IV won,
spreading the o-vowel not only to the participle of the Class V verbs, but also
to the preterites of both classes. For this reason, I treat the two classes as one.
Several verbs, especially the high frequency ones, underwent various idiosyncratic
or limited changes relative to the rest of the class. Sometimes these were triggered
by the Proto-Germanic morphology, such as when *bed- added the suffix -jan and
became biddan, likewise for licgan and sittan. Others were purely phonological,
such as the breaking of /e/ to /ie/ following /g/, as in giefan and gietan. The latter
two verbs I include in the table, though the quality of the first consonant in PDE
give and get comes not from the OE, which would have yielded /j/, but from Old
Norse (ON). Despite the ON origin of these verbs, which existed alongside their
inherited variants yeve and yet throughout ME, their continued strong inflection
is a result of the fact that their token frequency was always high. The strong
inflection of stick comes from Class III, and the verb itself is the result of a merger
between weak stician and Class V stecan. Table 2.6 presents the token frequency
data from LAEME and CELEX for Class IV and V verbs.
44
Table 2.6: Classes IV and V Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
W
S
S
W
S
W
W
S
W
S
W
Verb
come
see
give
speak
biddan
bear
licgan
sit
get
gitan
break
eat
wreak
steal
tear
mete
stecan
shear
reap
tread
knead
weave
weigh
LAEME
frequency
3477
1916
1250
1006
819
682
522
418
134
276
331
248
88
82
34
21
21
21
19
18
3
3
2
45
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
Verb
come
get
see
give
sit
speak
licgan
eat
break
CELEX
frequency
50327
45811
37213
23508
8978
6665
5796
5194
4102
S
S
S
S
W
S
S
S
W
W
W
W
W
bear
stecan
tear
steal
weigh
biddan
weave
tread
reap
shear
knead
wreak
mete
1934
1683
1101
941
632
389
262
217
78
71
52
24
0
In all of the corpora searched, through all of the time periods from OE through
PDE, come emerges consistently as the single most frequent strong verb. Classes
IV and V include other high frequency verbs, such as see and give, that retained
strong inflections of low or unique type frequency. In general, the CELEX data
do a somewhat better job of predicting strong and weak outcome. Only for weigh
is the outcome incorrectly predicted: predicted to be strong when it is in fact
weak. We saw in Class II that OE verbs with /g/ in the codas, like wegan,
underwent phonological changes in EME that caused them to lose resemblance to
the other verbs of their class. The weak outcome of weigh may be attributed in
part to this, as well as in part to confusion with the weak verb wecgan. Wreak
and mete are examples of verbs that declined in frequency over time and lost
their strong inflection. Not all verbs that declined in frequency did so: Class I
smite, for example, declined significantly from ME and is hardly in use in PDE,
but Merriam-Webster records only a strong preterite smote and strong participles
smitten and smote.
2.6
Class VI Verbs
The Class VI strong verbs of OE that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive
into PDE are ache, bake, drag/draw, fare, flay, gnaw, grave6 , heave, lade, laugh,
(for)sake, shake, shave, slay, stand, step, swear, wade, wake, and wash. The
philological difficulties with these verbs are as follows. Drag is either from ON, or,
if from OE dragan, a special dialectal development. The regular development in
the south is draw. Wake involves a fusion of a weak verb wacian and a Class VI
strong verb that occurs only in the preterite, unless one assigns an attested wæcnan
46
to the present. In any case, the PDE strong preterite woke, if from OE wōc, should
have come out so as to rhyme with shook. Wash exhibited many variant forms
in OE and ME, which causes overlap in search results with wax. Fortunately,
LAEME and CELEX are both lemmatized, though the other corpora are not, so
frequency counts from other periods reflect a certain amount of confusion between
wash and wax.
The verbs that retain the regular strong Class VI inflection are (for)sake,
shake, and stand. The ON Class VI verb taka entered the language in ME and has
likewise retained its inflection as take. The verbs that have become weak are ache,
bake, drag (if from dragan), fare, flay, gnaw, grave, heave, lade7 , laugh, shave,
step, wade, and wash. Some verbs that are weak in the preterite retain strong
participles or participial adjectives, such as graven and laden. The verbs that
remain strong but entered other classes are draw, slay, wake, and rarely, heave,
when the preterite hove is used. The token frequency data from LAEME and
CELEX are presented in Table 2.7.
47
Table 2.7: Class VI Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
W
S
S
S
S
S
S
W
W
W
S
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
Verb
stand
fare
take
draw
slay
swear
(for)sake8
wake
wash
heave
laugh
shake
wade
ache
flay
step
gnaw
grave
bake
shave
lade
LAEME
frequency
1161
520
515
473
334
207
153
109
81
72
42
30
20
19
12
12
10
7
4
2
2
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
W
S
W
S
W
S
W
W
W
W
W
W
S
W
W
S
W
W
Verb
CELEX
frequency
take
35196
stand
13850
draw
4638
laugh
3058
shake
2359
wash
1768
wake
1325
step
1065
swear
585
bake
423
shave
249
heave
242
ache
221
wade
149
grave
89
slay
79
gnaw
79
fare
51
(for)sake 40
flay
26
lade
0
It is interesting to observe that the LAEME data do a better job of predicting
the outcomes than the CELEX data. Slay provides another example of a verb
that declined in frequency over time but retained strong inflection. In this respect
it resembles smite and is unlike wreak and mete. In the case of slay, it retained
a strong inflection that was not its inherited form, but rather was generated by
analogy with Class VII verbs. Slay and Class VII verbs are discussed in section
2.7 of this chapter and at even greater length in Chapter 3.
The two forms incorrectly predicted by LAEME token frequencies are fare and
shake. Shake increased in frequency over time, and it resembles sake, take, and
48
wake. In PDE, the situation of shake and sake is reversed: it is now (for)sake that
is of low frequency and dependent upon phonological similarity to retain its strong
inflection. Bake and ache were not of sufficient frequency for even the phonological
similarity with the other Class VI verbs to make their strong preterites salient. It
is probable that bake was more frequent in the spoken language, being a homely
activity, than in the written corpus. Even so, it is weak in PDE, and I have no
explanation to offer other than low frequency. The pattern of Class VI verbs was
somewhat productive in ME. Like take, quake also acquired a preterite from this
class, although quook, used by Chaucer9 (MED s.v. quāken), has not survived.
As for fare, it was of very high frequency in EME and is now of very low
frequency in PDE. This alone might suffice to account for its weak outcome, but
a further complicating factor contributed. The EME paradigm of fare was similar
to the go ∼ went paradigm. Originally the preterite of wend, the highly frequent
form went became disassociated from the paradigm of wend, which was infrequent
in the present to the point of dying out. Having become detached from wend,
went then attached itself to go. The result was a suppletive paradigm go ∼ went.
Similarly, the highly frequent form ferde, originally the preterite of weak feran,
became disassociated from the paradigm of that verb, whose present was already
obsolescent in ME. Having become detached from feran, ferde attached itself to
faran, which was properly a strong verb. The result was an irregular paradigm
faran ∼ ferde. The irregularity was leveled out to fare ∼ fared by the 16th century
(OED). The distribution of preterite and non-preterite forms of the strong and
weak verbs in the LAEME corpus is shown in Table 2.8.
The 490 non-preterite forms of faran and the 201 preterite forms of feran thus
formed what would have been a suppletive paradigm were the roots of the two
49
Table 2.8: LAEME faran vs. feran Frequency
faran (strong)
feran (weak)
# preterite forms
30
201
# non-preterite forms
490
0
verbs not ultimately the same. Already in OE, the preterite was weighted in
favor of the weak verb. It is impossible to carry out an accurate search on the
untagged complete OE corpus for the preterite singular, because of the fact that
the preterite singular of strong faran, fōr, is homographic with the preposition for.
However, a search of the preterite plurals fōron and ferdon, and a search of the
preterite singulars fōr and ferde in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
OE Prose, reveal the imbalance. The distribution of preterite singular and plural
forms of the strong and weak verbs in the tagged OE corpus is shown in Table
2.9.
Table 2.9: Old English faran vs. feran Preterite Frequencies
faran (strong)
feran (weak)
# preterite forms
694
1493
# non-preterite forms
201
499
In OE, as in EME, the preterite of the weak verb outnumbers the preterite of
the strong verb. This distribution led to the pseudo-suppletive paradigm fare ∼
ferde in EME, which led to the weak paradigm fare ∼ fared in PDE.
50
2.7
Class VII Verbs
Class VII verbs are divided into 7 subclasses by Krygier. For present purposes,
however, it is most convenient to group VIIa-VIId together and call the result
VIIa, and to group VIIe-VIIf as VIIb. Neither of the verbs from VIIg survives. Of
VIIa, the verbs that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive into PDE are
ban, beat, fall, fold, hang, hew, hold, leap, salt, shed, walk, wax. Salt may be from
the strong verb sealtan, but may also have been from or influenced by the noun
salt. Similarly, aFertig (2009) notes that ban may be from the OE strong verb
bannan, the ON weak verb banna, and/or the noun ban. If the nouns played a
role in their development, they would be a factor in making these verbs lose their
strong preterites.
Of VIIb, the verbs that did not undergo lexical loss and that survive into PDE
are blow, crow, dread, flow, grow, know, let, low, mow, row, read, sow, sleep, throw.
For details on the exclusion of claw from this list, see Chapter 3. Dread, read, and
sleep had begun to develop weak forms already in OE. Read is synchronically
strong in PDE, due to a regular phonological rule of vowel shortening. Let is
synchronically a no-change verb, an inflection that is made possible by the final
dental, but unlike most such verbs, is not from a shortened weak preterite. The
OE ablaut was lǣtan ∼ lēt ∼ lēton ∼ lǣten. In ME, /æ:/ raised to /E:/. If
normal phonology had applied, both would have undergone the Great Vowel Shift
to /i:/, but a shortening of obscure origin applied first, resulting in /E/ for both
present and preterite. See Welna (1996: 139) for a summary of accounts of the
phonology, and the OED for possible parallels. Tables 2.10 and 2.11 present the
token frequency data from LAEME and CELEX for Class VII verbs.
51
Table 2.10: Class VIIa Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
S
S
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
Verb
hold
fall
hang
wax
beat
leap
shed
walk
fold
hew
ban
salt
LAEME
frequency
1495
666
231
158
106
84
82
48
43
21
14
5
PDE
outcome
S
W
S
S
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
W
52
Verb
hold
walk
fall
hang
beat
fold
leap
ban
shed
salt
hew
wax
CELEX
frequency
8644
5557
5341
2611
1553
847
549
362
274
72
18
0
Table 2.11: Class VIIb Token Frequencies
PDE
outcome
S
S
W
W
W
S
W
W
S
W
S
W
W
W
S/W
Verb
LAEME
frequency
let
1139
know 328
dread 308
read
197
sleep 128
blow 84
sow
84
flow
44
grow 31
mow 26
throw 21
low
11
row
9
glow
9
crow 3
PDE
outcome
S
S
W
S
S
W
S
W
W
W
W
W
S/W
W
W
Verb
CELEX
frequency
know 38013
let
7728
read
6719
grow 6189
throw 2940
sleep 2317
blow 1509
glow
298
sow
225
flow
701
dread 154
mow 84
crow 54
row
57
low
0
Using the data from LAEME, the Class VIIa verbs behave in perfect accordance with the frequency hypothesis. Hold, fall, and hang, the three most frequent
verbs, are strong, and the others are weak. Hang acquired hung by analogy with
Class III verbs such as clung. The frequency of walk is much higher in CELEX
than in LAEME, but its frequency did not increase early enough for the strong
preterite to be preserved. Morever, it ends in a liquid + consonant cluster, like all
the verbs of Class IIIb, which all became weak. As such, walk is treated further in
Chapter 4. The verbs in Table 10 behave perfectly according to token frequency
lines, with respect to each other. The high frequency of wax in LAEME might
lead us to expect it to have retained its strong inflection, but in the first place,
it has little phonological similarity to other verbs. Furthermore, wax declined in
frequency as grow began to replace it in meaning, which no doubt contributed to
53
its decline. See section 2.8 below for changes in frequency over time.
In contrast, the verbs of subclass VIIb do not behave according to token frequency. Read and dread are omitted, because they were partially weak already in
OE, and weak forms dominated in ME. Neither has any strong preterites in the
LAEME corpus, despite a high overall token frequency (see Appendix 2). Sleep
is similar to read and dread in acquiring weak preterites in OE, but its strong
preterite was more robust than theirs in ME. The OED admits the possibility
that beside strong slǣpan there was an unattested weak causative *slǣpan, identical in infinitive, to which the weak preterites were formed. Furthermore, the form
slept was reinforced by such preterites as crept, wept, kept, swept, and leapt, which
no doubt contributed to its dominance over the strong preterite.
The verbs that end in -ow, e.g. know, grow, sow, underwent a great deal
of change in frequency between EME and PDE, as Table 11 shows. Grow and
throw increased substantially in frequency, and sow and mow decreased. The
frequency data from CELEX correlate better with the inflectional outcomes than
the frequency data from LAEME, but the match is still not good. These verbs
warrant a separate treatment, which is given in Chapter 3.
2.8
Longitudinal Studies
The relative frequencies of most strong verbs did not change significantly between
EME and PDE. Some verbs, however, underwent an identifiable change in frequency. For verbs that changed in frequency, there are four possible categories
into which they could fall, combining the two factors of strong or weak outcome
and increase or decrease of frequency. This section traces the frequencies of one
54
verb in each category over time, using counts gathered from the historical corpora.
Smite is used as the example of a verb that declined in frequency over time, yet
remains strong.10 Wax is used as the example of a verb that declined in frequency
over time and lost its strong inflection. Walk is used as the example of a verb
that increased in frequency over time, yet failed to preserve its strong inflection.
Grow is used as the example of a verb that increased in frequency over time and
remains strong. The development of the frequencies of these verbs are depicted
numerically in Tables 12 through 15, and graphically in Table 16. Because of the
difficulty in obtaining all possible verbal forms for corpora other than LAEME and
CELEX, the numbers represent the combined number of hits for the four principal
parts: infinitive, preterite singular, preterite plural, and past participle. In later
periods, the second and third fall together. The final row is calculated by dividing
the frequency for wax by the size of the corpus and multiplying by 100 to obtain a
percentage. The OE counts are taken from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus,
which contains all extant OE texts. The EME counts are taken from the LAEME
corpus. The LME counts are taken from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
Middle English, combining the two periods called M3 and M4 by the creators of
the corpus. The EMnE counts are taken from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus
of Early Modern English, combining the three periods called E1, E2, and E3. The
PDE counts are taken from the CELEX corpus.
Some of the fluctuations between adjacent periods are no doubt due to chance.
The frequency hypothesis suggests that low frequency verbs that increased
their frequency earlier would be more likely to retain their strong inflection than
low frequency verbs that increased their frequency later. Similarly, high frequency
verbs that declined in frequency earlier would be more likely to lose their strong
55
inflection that high frequency verbs that declined in frequency later. Thus, we
would expect to see earlier changes in wax and grow than in smite and walk.
What we find is a climb in frequency for smite during the ME period, and
then a gradual decline. Wax indeed declined earlier, and dropped nearly out of
existence in EMnE. The later decline in frequency of smite accords well with the
fact that it preserved its inflection. In contrast, walk and grow both emerge from
obscurity in the middle of the ME period, and increase notably in EMnE. One
preserves its strong inflection, and the other does not.
The sample longitudinal studies in changes of frequency support the notion that
while token frequency is important, more factors than token frequency are at work.
Verbs whose change in frequency parallel each other have opposite inflectional
outcomes. In both cases, the conservative verbs, smite and grow, have support
from sizable families including verbs such as write and blow, whereas the verbs
that lost their inflection, wax and walk, are more morphologically isolated. These
results provide further support for the idea that a complete, in-depth study of
the frequencies of each verb in each historical period would not gain us further
explanatory power.
56
Table 2.12: Frequency of smite
OE
smite
Corpus
ratio * 100
EME
1150-1325
115
99
3,000,000 650,000
.004
.015
LME
1350-1500
131
727877
.018
EMnE
1500-1710
11
821647
.001
PDE
58
18,000,000
.0003
Table 2.13: Frequency of wax
OE
wax
Corpus
ratio * 100
EME
1150-1325
259
94
3,000,000 650,000
.009
.014
LME
1350-1500
23
727877
.003
EMnE
1500-1710
12
821647
.001
PDE
0
18,000,000
0
Table 2.14: Frequency of walk
OE
walk
Corpus
ratio * 100
EME
1150-1325
9
14
3,000,000 650,000
.0003
.002
LME
1350-1500
24
727877
.003
57
EMnE
1500-1710
127
821647
.015
PDE
5557
18,000,000
.031
Table 2.15: Frequency of grow
OE
grow
Corpus
ratio * 100
EME
1150-1325
28
19
3,000,000 650,000
.001
.003
LME
1350-1500
32
727877
.004
EMnE
1500-1710
120
821647
.015
Table 2.16: Longitudinal Frequencies
58
PDE
6189
18,000,000
.034
2.9
Conclusions
In this chapter, the frequency hypothesis was tested, to determine whether verbs of
higher frequency were more likely to remain strong than verbs of lower frequency.
Cases where the frequency hypothesis does not predict the behavior of the verbs
were identified as areas for the rest of the dissertation to explore.
Class I verbs are predictable according to the frequency hypothesis and have
a 50% rate of preservation of strong inflection. Class II verbs are less predictable
and have a preservation rate of only 17%. The low rate of survival is attributed
to the low phonological coherence among verbs, which bore little resemblance to
each other in comparison with Class I verbs. Moreover, three verbs, bid, cleave,
and dive, became confused with other verbs of similar semantics and phonology,
resulting in variation in the morphology that persists into PDE. Class II verbs illustrate the importance of phonological similarity for preservation of strong inflection.
Class IIIa verbs, the sing ∼ sang ∼ sung and cling ∼ clung type, also illustrated
the importance of phonological similarity for preservation. Every verb that bore a
resemblance to the others—all, in other words, besides burn and climb—remained
strong, while burn and climb became weak. Class IIIa verbs are addressed in
Chapter 3. Class IIIb verbs, which end in a liquid + consonant cluster, present a
crux. All verbs of this subclass, even ones of high frequency, such as help, became
weak. A solution for this crux is offered in Chapter 4. Class IIIc verbs, namely
fight, braid, and thresh, behave according to the frequency hypothesis. Class IV
and V verbs behave largely according to the frequency hypothesis, if CELEX frequencies rather than LAEME frequencies are used. In contrast, Class VI verbs
are better predicted according to the LAEME frequencies. Class VIIa verbs are
entirely predictable by LAEME frequencies, and except for walk, by CELEX fre-
59
quencies. Class VIIb verbs, especially those with preterites ending in <=ew>,
are predictable by CELEX frequencies and remarkably unpredictable by LAEME
frequencies. Chapter 3 addresses the importance of phonological similarity for
the verbs with <-ew> preterites, especially in earlier stages of English, but with
continuing effects even in PDE.
For the overall effectiveness of token frequency and class membership, Chapter
6 contains the quantitative analyses of the results obtained in the dissertation. It
is there demonstrated that the frequency hypothesis, while not explaining all of
the data, is the single factor with the most explanatory power for the inflectional
outcomes of the strong verbs.
60
Chapter 3
Cue Validity
3.1
Introduction
When we consider the impact of some phonological feature on the morphological
outcome of a verb, there are two ways in which this feature may be important.
There may be some inherent property of this feature that favors a strong or weak
outcome, in which case we give a functional account. Or the feature may have
become associated with a particular inflection through an accident of the language,
in which case we give a distributional account. In most cases, both make themselves
felt to different degrees. This chapter concentrates on distributional accounts,
with functional accounts playing a secondary role. The following chapter contains
examples of functional accounts where distributional phonological features play a
secondary role.
Distributional accounts of linguistic phenomena can be derived from more basic facts about cognitive processes. Building on Wittgenstein’s (1953) theory of
categories, Beach (1964) and Rosch and Mervis (1975) developed the concept of
61
cue validity to describe the relationship between features and categories. The idea
behind cue validity is that members of a category, such as a strong verb class, need
not all share identical features, nor need the features that they share be unique
to that category. Not all birds have wings, nor are all winged objects birds. The
greater the probability that a feature does belong to a category, the more quickly
the presence of that feature will lead to identification of that category. For example, the presence of wings will more quickly lead to the identification of an object
as a bird than the presence of eyes will. Rosch and Mervis (1975: 575) define
cue validity as a measure of the probability of feature X occurring in category Y,
calculated using the equation in (1).
(1) Cue validity formula
#X ∈ Y
#X
In our example of birds and wings, the cue validity of wings for identifying
birds is the number of winged birds divided by the number of winged objects.
As a hypothetical example, imagine that all dental-final words in English were
preterites. The cue validity of the feature “dental-final” for the category “preterite”
would be 1, the maximum possible. If a speaker heard a word ending in a dental,
s/he would immediately know the word was a weak preterite. Identification of
the word as preterite would proceed much faster than if the word ended in some
consonant not exclusive to the preterite. As it is, not all dental-final words in
English are weak preterites, but a word that ends in a dental stop stands a good
chance of being a dental preterite.11
In this chapter, two sets of verbs are studied in terms of cue validity. First,
the verbs from Old English (OE) Class III that ended in nasal or a nasal plus a
velar. This class is the source of Present Day English (PDE) verbs such as sing
62
and swim. Second, the verbs that take a preterite that ends in <-ew>, such as
know and grow. The presence or absence of an initial consonant cluster is a feature
relevant to both categories, and the presence or absence of final nasals, velars, and
the sequence <-ung>, are relevant to the Class III verbs.
3.2
Velar- and Nasal-Final Verbs
The set of Class III verbs ending in nasals and velars, such as sing ∼ sang ∼
sung, has been well studied. An important work is Bybee and Moder (1983),
which draws on the concepts, discussed above, of natural categories, developed
by Wittgenstein, Beach, and Rosch and Mervis. They describe Class III verbs in
terms of natural categories. In a theory of natural categories, there are several
characteristic features shared among the verbs, so that each verb has at least one
characteristic feature in common with at least one other member of the set, and
many verbs share multiple features with other verbs. For example, all members
of this class end in either a nasal or a velar, and many verbs end in a velar nasal,
e.g. sing, or a nasal followed a velar stop, e.g. shrink. A member that has most
or all of the features is a prototypical member. Other members may be fuzzier
and share fewer similarities. The approach using natural categories is in contrast
to an approach that seeks to define a class by means of defining features whose
presence is mandatory for all members.
3.2.1
History of Velar- and Nasal-Final Verbs
Here follows a description of the philological history of these verbs. In OE, they
conjugated according to the ablaut pattern shown in Table 3.1. In OE, Class
63
III verbs stems could be described as ending in any nasal + consonant sequence,
including a geminate nasal. Following Homorganic Cluster Lengthening in Middle
English (ME), Class III split in two, with -nd verbs forming a subclass distinct
from the rest. Also in Early Middle English (EME), degemination applied to
the geminate nasals. Of the verbs ending in nasals plus labial stops, there were
four in OE. Two, cimban ‘join’ and hrimpan ‘frown’, did not survive into ME.
A third, climban ‘climb’, also underwent HCL. That left hlimpan (ME limpen)
‘befall’ as the sole member of this class with a final labial stop. It underwent
lexical loss in the fifteenth century. The verb stems could then be described as
ending in a nasal or a nasal + velar, with the single exception of limpen. In Early
Modern English (EMnE), the phonemicization of the velar nasal took place. This
development had the potential to result in a class described as exclusively nasalfinal, but the sing pattern was extended to verbs, such as dig, that ended in a velar
stop, with no nasal. Since EMnE, members of the class have ended in a nasal, or a
velar, and most often a velar nasal. Bybee and Moder (1983: 143) emphasize the
important role of the phonological similarities in making this a highly productive
class, in contrast to classes where verbs of a greater variety of final consonants
were admitted, e.g. speak, weave, tear.
Table 3.1: Old English Class III Inflection
sing
Infinitive Pret. Sg
singan
sang
Pret. Pl.
sungon
Past. Part.
sungen
During ME, speakers began to employ the vocalism of the past participle and
preterite plural in the preterite singular for many strong verbs, with the result
that the original vocalism of the preterite was lost for approximately half of the
sing-cling verbs, leaving an ablaut pattern with only two grades. Table 3.2 shows
64
the inflection of the verbs according to the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD),
with column 1 containing verbs for which the dictionary records a preterite in
/a/, and column 3 those verbs for only a preterite in /2/ is given. The former
are referred to as tri-alternate, and the latter as bi-alternate. Columns 2 and
4 show the earliest century of attestation for a preterite in /2/ for each verb.12
The dates of attestation are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and
Middle English Dictionary (MED). For many readers, the classification of verbs
into bi-alternate and tri-alternate will differ from that given in Table 3.2, for the
reduction of grades is still an ongoing process. For example, there are speakers for
whom the only possible past tense of spring is sprung, etc.
Krygier (1994) presents a comprehensive picture of the strong verbs in OE
and each century of ME, indicating which verbs are attested in what period, and
how their present tense was formed. In a search of Krygier (255-67), I found only
two verbs ending in nasals and velars that are attested throughout ME but were
subject to lexical loss before PDE. These verbs are swinken ’work, strive’ and
thringen ’press, crowd’. Unfortunately, due to the great variation in vocalism of
all verbs, it is difficult to speak of a bi-alternate or tri-alternate “outcome” in the
PDE standard dialect. Even the verbs classified as tri-alternate in the dictionaries,
as listed in Table 3.2, have a long history of u-grade preterite singulars, many of
which are the only possible preterites in the dialects of Present Day speakers.
Therefore, it is impossible to define an outcome for swink and thring without PDE
attestations, and they cannot be used in Tables 3.2 and 3.3 for calculations of
bi-alternate and tri-alternate categories.
In addition to the verbs in Table 3.2, which inherited the inflectional pattern
of OE Class III, there exist also verbs that obtained this pattern by analogical
65
Table 3.2: Bi-alternate and Tri-alternate
Tri-alternate
begin ∼ began ∼ begun
drink ∼ drank ∼ drunk
run ∼ ran ∼ run
shrink ∼ shrank ∼ shrunk
sink ∼ sank ∼ sunk
sing ∼ sang ∼ sung
spring ∼ sprang ∼ sprung
stink ∼ stank ∼ stunk
swim ∼ swam ∼ swum
Date of p.sg.
<ung>
attestation
16th
16th
none
17th
17th
16th
16th
17th
none
Bi-alternate
cling ∼ clung
sling ∼ slung
slink ∼ slunk
spin ∼ spun
sting ∼ stung
swing ∼ swung
wring ∼ wrung
win ∼ won13
Date of p.sg.
<ung>
attestation
16th
17th
17th
none
16th
18th
14th
none
extension. Table 3.3 presents the data for such verbs as are listed in the AHD.
Some verbs, such as drag, have the Class III inflection only in nonstandard use and
have not yet made it to the dictionary. See the Dictionary of American Regional
English and Bybee and Moder (1983) for other examples. Column 2 lists the
etymological source of each verb. Column 3 lists the earliest dates of attestation
for an <-a-> or <-o-> preterite, if any. In every case but ring, the preterite in
/a/ never caught on, and the PDE preterite is thus homophonous with the past
participle in /2/. Columns 4 and 5 list the earliest dates of attestation for the
<-u-> preterite and past participle. Dates of attestation are taken from the OED
and MED.
Two aspects of the verbs with Class III inflection require explanation. First,
which verbs reduced such that the dictionaries no longer list a past tense with an
a-grade? Second, why did verbs reduce in favor of the u-grade rather than the
a-grade (cf. Bybee and Slobin 1982: 117)?
66
Table 3.3: Analogically Extended Verbs
Verb
Source
<a, o>
preterite
dig ∼ dug
fling ∼ flung
hang ∼ hung15
OF diguer
ON
14th
Class VII hōn
weak hangian
ON hengian
ring ∼ rang ∼ rung denominal
13th
stick ∼ stuck
weak stician
Class V stecan
strike ∼ struck
Class I strı̄can
string ∼ strung
denominal
<u> preterite <u> past
participle
18th
16th
∼15th14
17th
15th
15th
15th
16th
13th
16th
17th
17th
16th
17th
The answer to the first question follows the predictions of the frequency hypothesis. Low-frequency verbs were more likely to lose their a-grade preterite.
Verbs that bore a strong phonological resemblance to these low-frequency verbs
were also likely to reduce. Table 3.4 shows the EME token frequency of the trialternate verbs that did not reduce in the standard dialect. Column 2 records
the number of hits for the preterite first and third singular, where the a-grade is
expected. Column 3 records the number of hits for the preterite plural and second
singular, and the past participle, where the u-grade is expected. Table 3.5 shows
the same data for the alternate verbs that did reduce to bi-alternate and that
have only two grades recorded in the AHD. The frequencies are taken from the
Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME).
The frequency hypothesis predicts that the bi-alternate verbs should be, on
average, less frequent than the tri-alternate verbs. Tables 3.4 and 3.5 support this
hypothesis. The intuitive appraisal of the difference in the relative frequencies
67
Table 3.4: Tri-alternate LAEME Frequencies
Tri-alternate verbs
(be)gin ∼ (be)gan ∼ (be)gun
drink ∼ drank ∼ drunk
run ∼ ran ∼ run
shrink ∼ shrank ∼ shrunk
sink ∼ sank ∼ sunk
sing ∼ sang ∼ sung
spring ∼ sprang ∼ sprung
stink ∼ stank ∼ stunk
swim ∼ swam ∼ swum
Total
(without (be)gin)
Average
(without (be)gin)
1st, 3rd Pret. sg. Pret. pl.,
Total
2nd sg. & part.
489
180
669
21
21
42
35
7
42
0
0
0
6
4
10
20
31
51
23
20
43
4
8
12
4
3
7
602
274
876
(113)
(94)
(207)
97.3
(23)
can be confirmed by a conducting a re-randomization test, also called a permutation test, on the frequencies. The re-randomization tests the hypothesis that the
distribution of the frequencies over the two groups, bi-alternate and tri-alternate,
is not random. It does this by redistributing the frequencies at random 10,000
times, creating 10,000 different samples to compare the observed data to. For the
hypothesis that the distribution of Tables 3.4 and 3.5 is non-random, and the high
frequency verbs are indeed more likely to be bi-alternate, the re-randomization test
gives a p-value of less than 0.0001. The statistical analysis supports the hypothesis
that the more frequent verbs were more conservative in their morphology.
In terms of phonological features, the bi-alternate verbs are rather coherent, as
noted by Bybee and Moder (1983) for PDE. All the verbs of the bi-alternate set,
with the exception of win, are alike in having an initial consonant cluster. Of the
68
Table 3.5: Bi-alternate LAEME Frequencies
Bi-alternate
cling ∼ clung
sling ∼ slung
slink ∼ slunk
spin ∼ spun
sting ∼ stung
swing ∼ swung
wring ∼ wrung
win ∼ won
Total
Average
Expected a-grade
0
0
0
0
5
2
15
38
60
Expected u-grade Total
3
3
2
2
0
0
1
1
19
24
0
2
4
19
34
72
63
123
13.7
8 verbs, 5 end in <-ng>, whereas only 2 tri-alternate verbs end in <-ng>. In the
tri-alternate set, only one verb, spring, has both the initial cluster and the <ng>,
and its frequency of 43 nearly equals the combined frequency of the 5 bi-alternate
verbs ending in <-ng>—cling, sling, sting, swing, wring—which total 50. In other
words, the high token frequency of spring overrode its phonological similarity to
the other verbs, thus causing it to remain conservatively tri-alternate. Spin is
bi-alternate in American English, with span absent from the American Heritage
Dictionary, but tri-alternate in British English, with span present in the Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Welna records span as a form lasting in American
English until the 19th century. I conclude that the low token frequency of spin is
what caused it to reduce eventually, but its failure to end in a velar is what caused
it to be conservative so long.
The high frequency of win, combined with its lack of initial cluster and its lack
of a final velar, leaves its reduction completely unexpected. The answer is perhaps
to be sought in a sporadic rounding and raising effect of the initial /w/, such as
69
occurred in its homophone one, which ought to rhyme with alone (OED s.v. one).
The remaining bi-alternate verb to be explained is slink. It resembles shrink
closely in phonological structure as well as in its LAEME frequency, which leads
one to wonder why its only possible preterite is slunk, while shrink retains shrank
alongside innovative shrunk. Both slink and shrink are unattested in the LAEME
corpus; however, it is likely that they were not equally infrequent, but that this
apparent similarity in frequency is an accident of the generally low attestation
of these verbs in LAEME. For PDE, the CELEX corpus (Baayen et al. 1995)
gives a noticeably higher frequency for shrink (364) than for slink (30). A search
of Early English Books Online gives a similar disparity: 4340 hits for shrink and
only 181 for slink. It is therefore to be concluded that in ME and EMnE shrink was
more frequent than slink, as is the case in PDE. The frequency difference explains
the PDE outcome shrank—which, nevertheless many PDE speakers do not use;
cf. “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”—alongside slunk. In addition, Bybee and Moder
(1983: 134) find that one feature of this class in PDE is that the first consonant
of the cluster is /s/ in nine of their eighteen verbs. It may be the case, seeing that
/s/ is the first consonant of the cluster in 5 of the 8 bi-alternate verbs in Table
3.5, that not beginning with /s/ was another factor that weighed against shrink.
The fact that wring appears from Table 3.3 to have begun reducing earlier than
the rest, when it has the highest frequency of the bi-alternate verbs, is contrary
to what we expect and to a general tendency observed here: that verbs of higher
frequency are more conservative in their inflection than those of lower frequency.
Furthermore, most of the verbs in Table 3.5, which became bi-alternate, are completely unattested in the preterite in the LAEME corpus. These two facts lead
me to believe that behind the scenes, outside of the extant written corpus, several
70
of the other verbs began reducing before wring, and it was their influence that
helped contribute to the reduction of the higher frequency wring. In other words,
because wrung as a past tense is first attested in the 14th century, slung, clung,
thrung, stung, swung were probably in the spoken language prior to that, despite
their absence from the written record until the 16th and 17th centuries.
Of the verbs that were added to this class subsequent to OE, Bybee and Moder
(1983: 141-42) note that only one, ring, is tri-alternate in PDE. Table 3.3 shows
that it was also the earliest of the verbs to be added to this class, being present
in the language by the 13th century. The inflection of ring shows that at this
early date, even if reduction had already begun, the tri-alternate inflection was
still productive. In addition, fling, though bi-alternate in PDE, illustrates the
productivity of the tri-alternate inflection in ME. Having joined the Class III
verbs, it behaved like other low-frequency verbs beginning with a consonant cluster
and ending in <-ng> by becoming bi-alternate. Verbs such as string, strike, dig,
and stick, which did not join this class until later, after ring and fling, received
bi-alternate inflections from the start. They began to appear in EMnE, around
the same time that bi-alternate inflections began to appear in the written record,
having, according to my supposition, been in the spoken language since the first
half of ME.
3.2.2
Loss of -ang
Having examined the distribution of verbs according to whether they are bialternate or tri-alternate in PDE, and having seen that most of their outcomes
were determined by a combination of token frequency and phonological similarity,
we can now turn our attention to the question of why, when the reduction took
71
place, it was in favor of the u-grade rather than the a-grade. One consideration
may have been that the u-grade occurred in both the preterite plural and the past
participle—in other words, in half of the four principal parts. One could posit that
it was less disruptive to the paradigm to change one principal part as opposed to
two. This phenomenon would be a form of intra-paradigmatic leveling.
However, other strong verbs show that even if the number of principal parts
was a factor, it could not have been the whole story. OE Class IV strong verbs
inflected according to the pattern in Table 3.6. Like many sing-cling verbs, they
lost the vowel of their preterite in favor of the vowel of the past participle, arriving
at the paradigm shown in the table.
Table 3.6: Class IV Strong Verbs
OE
PDE
Infinitive Pret. sg.
beran
bær
bear
bore
Pret. pl.
bǣron
bore
Participle
boren
born(e)
The preterites of these classes had vowels of the same quality, namely /æ/, in
the singular and plural. Yet instead of extending the /æ/ of these two principal
parts to the participle, the participial vowel /O:/ was extended to both principal
parts of the preterite, in spite of the greater paradigmatic changes required.
If type frequency, in terms of number of principal parts with a given vowel,
is not the answer, the next logical place to turn is token frequency. The first
hypothesis to test whether the u-grade forms simply outnumbered the a-grade
forms, and the a-grade forms began to die out. The token frequencies from Table
3.7 show why this hypothesis cannot hold the explanation either.
It is true that there is a difference between the percentage of u-grade forms of
tri-alternate verbs and those of bi-alternate verbs. However, whether or not we
72
Table 3.7: Bi-alternate vs. Tri-alternate Frequency
a-forms u-forms
602
274
113
94
Tri-alternate
Tri-alternate
(without (be)gan)
Bi-alternate
60
63
% u-forms
31%
45%
51%
take the unusually frequent (be)gan into consideration, the 51% ratio of u-grade
forms to a-grade forms for the verbs that reduced is certainly not enough to explain
why the original preterite vocalism was lost.
If type frequency and token frequency are not sufficient to explain why cling ∼
clang ∼ clung reduced to cling ∼ clung ∼ clung rather than cling ∼ clang ∼ clang,
we must turn elsewhere. In discussing the reasons for the productivity of the singcling class relative to other strong verb patterns, such as classes I and II, Bybee
and Moder (1983) propose cue validity as one possible factor. They point to the
paucity of PDE words ending in /ung/ or /unk/ outside of Class III verbs, which
means that the features word-final /ung/ and word-final /unk/ correlate well with
the category of past tense. If this cue validity contributed to the productivity of
these verbs, then it may well also have contributed to the survival of clung.
I quantify their hypothesis by comparing the distribution of the word-final sequences in ME. The orthographic sequences <ung>, <ang>, <unk>, and <ank>
were gathered from LAEME. Instances of the sequence <ong> were added to
the count for <ung> when tongue and young were spelled with <o>; likewise
for <onk> in monk. In principle, because the sequence <on> may represent a
pronunciation /un/, instances of <ong> and <onk> in the preterite singular of
strong verbs may represent an analogical extension of <ung>/<unk> from the
73
preterite plural and past participle. I do not include them, because while <an>
and <on> are both used for the preterite singular in LAEME, <un> is never
used. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that if the spelling <un> was used to
represent /un/ in the preterite plural and past participle, it was never used in the
preterite singular if /un/ was indeed the pronunciation. Free variation between
<un> and <on> would be expected. It is more likely that <on> in the preterite
singular always represents [On]—the allophone of /an/—and never /un/ in the
LAEME corpus. Instances of <on> in strong preterite singulars are therefore not
included.
The goal is to compute whether /ung/ in ME had higher a cue validity for
preterites than /ang/ did. Using LAEME, the number of ung-final words is compared to the number of ang-final words. Because of the great confusion in spelling
and allophony between /an/ and /on/, the search for ang-final forms was conducted on lemmas ending in <-ang> and <-ong> and forms ending in <-ang>.
A total of 112 hits was obtained. The search for ung-final forms was conducted on
forms ending in <-ung>, and a total of 78 hits was obtained. In all cases, forms
with more than one syllable have been ignored.
The number of preterites was obtained by searching for all strong preterite first
and third singular forms of verbs with -ng- in the lemma. A total of 90 hits was
obtained. If all 90 preterites were ang-final, the cue validity of /ang/ for strong
preterites would be 90/(90+112) = 44.5%. If all 90 preterites were ung-final, the
cue validity of /ung/ for strong preterites would be 90/(90+78) = 54%. The same
searches were carried out for /ank/ and /unk/ words, obtaining 5 ank-final words,
1 unk-final word, and 28 preterite first and third singulars for verbs ending in -nk.
The figures are presented in Table 3.8.
74
Table 3.8: LAEME Cue Validity
an(g/k)-final
Non-preterites
112 (-ang)
5 (-ank)
Potential Preterites 90 (-ang)
28 (-ank)
Total
235
Cue validity
50.00%
un(g/k)-final
78 (-ung)
1 (-unk)
90 (-ung)
28 (-unk)
197
60.00%
A one-tailed z-test for two sample proportions is appropriate, because it was
anticipated that the proportion in the third column would be greater than the
proportion of the second column. The z-value obtained is 2.09, which gives a
p-value of less than .02. These calculations support Bybee’s hypothesis that at
the time the verbs began to reduce their inflection in favor of /ung/ throughout,
the feature /ung/ and /unk/ had a higher potential cue validity for the category
strong past tense than /ang/ and /ank/. When an /ung/ or /unk/ preterite was
heard, it was less likely to be confused with an adjective, noun, present tense
verb, or other category. As use of /ung/ and /unk/ preterites increased, the
greater recognizability of these forms as past tenses facilitated communication
among speakers.
The sing-cling class of verbs have presented cases where the frequency hypothesis makes the correct predictions and cases where it does not. In cases where
the frequency hypothesis was inadequate to explain the data, the behavior was
attributed to the effects of word structure, namely the presence of an initial consonant cluster, the presence of an initial /s/, and the presence of a final sequence
in -ung, -ang, -unk, or -ank. Verbs similar in phonological structure tended to
75
behave similarly. The effects were twofold. Low frequency verbs, such as slink,
retained their strong inflection beyond what the frequency hypothesis would predict. Higher frequency verbs that ended in -ng were more likely to reduce from
three principal parts to two, if they were phonologically similar to the low frequency verbs that reduced, most of which ended in -ng, and began with a cluster,
especially one beginning with /s/. These structural similarities account for the
reduction in verbs such as wring and sting, when the frequency hypothesis alone
would predict that they remain tri-alternate.
Phonological structure is also argued to have played a role in the selection of
-ung over -ang as the past tense for sing-cling verbs. Preterites that ended in
-ung and -unk were more distinctly recognizable as preterites, for they had higher
cue validity. The higher cue validity results from the interaction of frequency and
word structure. These phenomena in the sing-cling class are used as supporting
evidence for the hypotheses about the behavior of the <-ew> verbs in section 3.3.
3.3
The <-ew> Verbs
In OE, verbs with preterites in <-ēow> belonged to Class VII (Krygier 1994),
divided approximately evenly between verbs with infinitives in <-āwan> and those
with infinitives in <-ōwan>, in addition to an isolated verb hēawan ‘hew’. Table
3.9 shows the OE ablaut patterns.
Table 3.9: Class VII <-ēow> Preterites
know
bloom
hew
Infinitive
cnāwan
blōwan
hēawan
Pret. Sg
cnēow
blēow
hēow
76
Pret. Pl.
cnēowon
blēowon
hēowon
Past. Part.
cnāwen
blōwen
hēawen
Like cnāwan were conjugated blāwan ‘blow’, clāwan ‘claw’, crāwan ‘crow’,
māwan ‘mow’, rāwan ‘divide’, sāwan ‘sow’, ðrāwan ‘throw, curl’, wāwan ‘blow’.
Like blōwan were conjugated flōwan ‘flow’, glōwan ‘glow’, grōwan ‘grow’, hlōwan
‘bellow’, rōwan ‘row’, snōwan ‘hasten’, spōwan ‘succeed’.
The following phonological changes, chronologically ordered, affected the verbs
of this type.
• (1) /o:w/ and /a:w/ > /Ou/
• (2) /eow/ <ēow> > /eu/,
• (3) /æaw/ <ēaw> > /Eu/.
• (4) /eu/ > /iu/
• (5) /iu/ and /Eu/ > /ju/
Changes 1-3 occurred by about 1250, except in the north (Lass 1992: 50-51).
Change 4 occurred in later ME (ibid.), and change 5 occurred in the 16th (Welna
1996: 196) or 17th century (Lass 1999: 98-102).
The morphological result of these changes is that cnāwan ‘know’ and blōwan
‘blow’ conjugated identically from ME on, except in the north, where the two
classes remained distinct. Outside of the north, the only verb to retain a conjugation distinct from the others was hēawan ‘hew’. Table 3.3 shows the ME ablaut
patterns circa 1300.
As in other instances in this study, I eliminate the following verbs from consideration: rāwan ‘divide’, wāwan ‘blow’, and spōwan ‘succeed’, which are not attested after OE, according to the OED, MED, and Krygier (266-267); and clāwan,
because the OED finds it doubtful that the PDE verb claw is descended directly
77
Table 3.10: ME Principal parts
Infinitive
know knOu@n
blow blOu@n
hew
hEu@n
Pret. sg.
kneu
bleu
heu
Pret. pl.
kneu@n
bleu@n
heu@n
Participle
knOu@n
blOu@n
hEu@n
from the OE strong verb. Were clāwen the source of PDE claw, the expected
infinitive would be the unattested clow*. It is more likely that weak clawian is the
source, and that the strong preterite clew, found in the 14th and 15th centuries,
was an analogy that failed to catch on, rather than a direct reflex of clēow. As
we shall see later, <-ew> preterites were analogically extended to several verbs
during the 14th and 15th centuries. Some of these analogous <-ew> preterites
were retained into PDE, while others fell out of use. Additionally, analogical clew
has continued to arise independently in various dialects, even after ME, according
to the OED. The remaining verbs to be considered are thus blow, crow, flow, glow,
grow, hew, low, mow, row, sow, and throw.
3.3.1
Token Frequency
Previous works on the strong verbs, including Hooper (1976), Hare and Elman
(1995), Lieberman et al. (2007), have treated the relative frequencies of English
verbs as constant over time. The implication is that any sufficiently large corpus
from any period during the history of English can be used to gather the frequency
data for a study of the history of English verbs. For most verbs, my own research
has confirmed this overall stability of frequencies. However, tables 3.11 through
3.13 show that the relative frequencies of the <-ew> verbs changed significantly
78
over time. Table 3.11 presents the verbs sorted by the token frequency of their
preterite singular, their preterite, and the sum of their four principal parts. The
frequency searches were carried out on the Dictionary of Old English Corpus,
which contains the entire extant OE corpus. Due to the untagged nature of the
corpus, it was not practical to search for all possible inflected forms in which
a verb could occur, and to disambiguate all possible homographic forms manually. For this reason, the four principal parts were used as search queries. Table
3.12 presents the frequencies from LAEME, with searches carried out both for all
preterite forms, and for all instances of the verb. Table 3.13 presents the PDE frequencies taken from the CELEX database. Here, the total for all instances of the
verbs is given. The total is given for PDE verbs, whereas the total plus individual
parts are given for earlier stages, because the earlier stages present such a poor fit
between outcome and frequency. Without the breakdown into parts, it could be
argued that it is not the frequency of the verb as a whole that matters, but the
frequency of the preterite. Including these data allows us to see that the frequency
of the preterite at early stages does not do an adequate job of predicting outcome
either.
From Tables 3.11 and 3.12, it can be seen that OE and EME frequencies do
a poor job of predicting PDE outcome. Grow, crow, and throw have remarkably
low frequencies given their strong outcome, and flow and sow have remarkably
high frequencies given their weak outcome. The PDE frequencies in Table 3.13
correlate with inflectional outcome much more closely, leaving only the retention
of a strong crew16 unexplained.
The increase in frequency of grow and throw as they began to acquire the
semantics of wax and warp respectively, no doubt played a role in the survival of
79
Table 3.11: OE Frequencies
Preterite sg.
(cnēow)
know
blow
flow
sow
hew
crow
row
glow
grow
throw
low
mow
310
64
51
28
16
10
7
3
6
1
0
0
Preterite
(cnēow +
cnēowon)
know 404
flow
76
blow 66
sow
39
hew
27
row
14
crow 10
glow
3
grow 9
mow 2
low
1
throw 1
Total
(cnāwan + cnēow +
cnēowon + cnāwen)
know 975
blow 125
flow
119
hew
59
sow
54
grow 30
row
26
glow
3
crow 11
throw 6
low
5
mow 4
their strong inflection. However, not only must the survival of crew be accounted
for, so must the fact that grow and throw did not lose their strong inflection
when they were still relatively infrequent. To develop an explanation for the
unexpected survival of strong inflection, the following section considers cases of
analogical extension of the <-ew> preterite. The following section shows how these
analogical extensions are parallel to some of the cases of unexpected survival.
3.3.2
Spread of <-ew> Preterites
In the 14th century, <-ew> preterites began to spread to other verbs, both weak
verbs and strong verbs of other classes. The vowel of the present tense was not
a criterion for the analogy, for <-ew> preterites were formed both to presents
with /Ou/ and to presents with other vowels, such as slay. The latter type is
80
Table 3.12: EME Frequencies
LAEME pret. sg.
know 23
know
blow 14
sow
sow
9
blow
grow 6
grow
flow
5
flow
hew
3
hew
throw 3
throw
low
1
mow
crow 0
low
glow
0
row
mow 0
glow
row
0
crow
LAEME pret.
47
26
23
9
7
7
3
2
1
1
0
0
LAEME total
know 349
blow 86
sow
85
flow
45
grow 31
mow 26
throw 21
hew
20
low
11
row
10
glow
9
crow 3
explained by Bybee and Slobin (1982: 103) with reference to a product-oriented
schema, a concept developed by Bybee and explained in detail in the introduction.
This particular schema specifies a past tense with an initial consonant cluster, an
<-ew> nucleus, and no coda. PDE, as noted by Bybee and Slobin, retains the
product-oriented schema in the diversity of presents with <-ew> preterites: blow,
fly, slay, draw.
The criteria for membership, explained by Bybee and Slobin as a productoriented schema, can be fit into a source-oriented rule as well, specifying that the
vowel of a verb beginning with a consonant cluster is changed to <-ew> in the
preterite, if the vowel lies at the word boundary. The morphological rule is given
in (2).
(2) Generating <-ew> preterites
V → ew / CC__#
81
Table 3.13: PDE Frequencies
CELEX
know
grow
throw
blow
flow
glow
sow
mow
row
crow
low
hew
total
38013
6112
2858
1507
616
298
225
84
74
54
51
18
One such verb that acquired an <-ew> preterite in the 14th century was
snouen, which was formed from the noun snou and came to replace the inherited OE verb snīwan. The editors of the OED and MED agree that it acquired a
preterite snew by analogy with the original <-ew> verbs from Class VII. It was
the presence of the initial consonant cluster, according to my hypothesis, that
qualified it for membership among the <-ew> preterites. The strong preterite is
attested sporadically until the 19th century, but eventually lost out to the competing preterite snowed.
Also in the 14th century, draw acquired the past tense drew by analogy with
the Class VII verbs (Welna 1996: 135-6). The first point to notice is that it too
has an initial consonant cluster. The second point to notice is that the vowel of
the infinitive drauen, /au/, does not match the vowel of blouen, /Ou/. For this
reason, the OED says that the analogy took place in the north. In the north,
as stated in section 3.3, the sound changes that resulted in the ME diphthongal
82
system did not take place. The verbs that in OE had a stem in /a:w/ did not
shift to /Ou/ and merge with the verbs that originally had a stem in /o:w/, as
they did in the south, but remained distinct. Instead, /a:w/ became /au/. In the
north, therefore, the diphthongs of the infinitives drauen and blauen would have
been identical, allowing for the following analogy: blauen : bleu :: drauen : dreu.17
The same analogy occurred in gnaw, which was still pronounced with an initial
/gn/ in ME. Gnaw, like draw, qualified for an <-ew> preterite by reason of its
initial consonant cluster. This form gnew was current during the 14th through
16th centuries, although it eventually lost in favor of the weak gnawed, with which
it was already competing in the 14th century (OED). Similarly, in the 14th and
15th centuries, clew is attested as a preterite for claw, which derives from the OE
weak verb clawian (OED).
In the south of England, after the merger of /a:w/ and /o:w/, all verbs with
<-ew> preterites had the same vowel in the infinitive–and thereby in the present
tense as well. After drew and gnew were borrowed from the north, though, this
situation no longer obtained. Most verbs had /Ou/, but some had /au/. This
situation seems to have led to what can be described as a generalizing of the
environment in which the rule applied, or a creation of a product-oriented schema,
in which the vowel of the present was irrelevant. Other verbs that joined this class
in the 14th century exhibited a variety of present tense vowels, which have survived
to the present day.
An uncontroversial example is slay, which in the 14th century began to replace
its inherited preterite slōg with slew. Welna (1996: 137-8) attributes the replacement to analogy with knew, threw, grew, etc. The fact that slay possesses all the
necessary attributes for joining this class—the initial consonant cluster and the
83
absence of a coda—means that the mechanism by which the analogy proceeded
is well-defined. The same applies to flay, which in the 14th century acquired a
preterite flew, although that form eventually lost out to the weak preterite.
More controversial is why fly has the preterite flew. The explanation the OED
proffers is “confusion with flow (OE pa. tense fléow), with which this vb. had in
the 15th c. come to coincide in the pa. pple; cf. however the somewhat similar
phenomenon in the verb slay, pa. tense slew, for which no parallel explanation can
be given.” However, according to the OED itself,the past tense flew of flow did not
survive so long. “The wk. pa. tense and pa. pple appear in early ME.; the original
str. pa. tense appears not to have survived into the 14th century” (OED s.v. flow).
Nor does the MED provide any examples of flew as a preterite of flow after the 13th
century. It is therefore difficult to see how an analogy between fly and flow could
have proceeded in the 15th century, and I cannot accept this explanation. Other
scholars, such as Long (1944: 46), following Luick (1921: §§419, 427), explain flew
via dissimilation, whereby flōw became flūw and was from there dissimilated to
fliu <flew>. While there is no direct evidence against this account, there is no
apparent motivation for it either. The explanation given by Horn (1911: 36) and
Price (1910: §46) is analogy with the Class VII verbs knew, threw, grew, etc.
Given that fly has an initial consonant cluster and lacks a coda, flew fits the
criteria for membership in the class of <-ew> verbs. Furthermore, by the 15th
century, the type frequency of this class had been increased by the addition of
snow, draw, gnaw, and slay, so we can see that it was both a sizable and a
productive class when fly entered it. I therefore see no reason to explain fly ∼
flew any differently than flay ∼ flew, likewise first attested in the 15th century,
was explained above. Both can be explained the same way as snow, draw, gnaw,
84
and slay a century earlier, and thanks to the number of its predecessors leading
to a high type frequency for this class, flew is even less surprising as an analogical
preterite than they were. The fact that fly ∼ flew survived into PDE and flay
became weak is accounted for by token frequency. The LAEME corpus contains
120 instances of the lexeme fly and only 12 of flay. The fact that fly ∼ flew won
out over the competing strong preterites fleih/fleiZ and flow, I attribute to the
high type frequency of the <-ew> preterite.
These are all the relevant instances of the spread of the <-ew> preterite I
have been able to find: snow, draw, gnaw, claw, slay, flay, and fly. Instances of
the spread in verbs that lack an initial cluster, such as saw and daw ’dawn’, are
limited to Scots English, where they spread to the north of England, but not the
south. Scots constitutes a separate dialect, in which the cluster was apparently
not a sine qua non for entrance into the class of <-ew> verbs. A separate study
involving frequencies and dates of attestation in Scots would be called for to explain the behavior of this class in this dialect. One might investigate whether the
Class VII members that lacked a cluster, such as mow, sow, row, low, lost their
strong preterites later than in England. Perhaps these verbs were more frequent
in Scotland, which prevented the <-ew> preterite from losing its association with
cluster-less verbs, as happened elsewhere. In any case, the different linguistic situation that obtained in Scots does not impact on the East Midlands dialect that
most influenced standard Present Day British and American English.
Even more anomalous is laugh, which fails utterly to fit the schema for <-ew>
preterites, as it both lacks an initial consonant cluster and possesses a coda, yet
the MED lists leu3(e, leuh, leu as preterites. According to the MED, “Past forms
in -eu-, -ei- may be due in part to anal. with the forms of verbs like knouen,
85
sēn, etc.” While leu itself at least partly fits the schema in lacking a coda, it is
a secondary form that can be derived from the others through loss of [Z]. The
forms with a coda are primary. Because they fail to fit the schema, we should
seek outside Class VII for an explanation of the <-eu> preterites of laugh. There
are other unexpected preterites listed in the MED, such as leigh and leie, and the
behavior of laugh is peculiar enough to warrant further study of its own.
In Albright and Hayes (2003), the authors present the results of an experiment
testing native speakers’ judgments of the acceptability of various preterites for
nonce words. One verb form of interest was the form frew, which some speakers
accepted as a possible past tense for fro (40). Unfortunately, no verbs without
clusters, such as fo, are included for comparison, as the authors were testing a
different hypothesis altogether.
Based on the instances of verbs that acquired an <-ew> preterite in the 14th
and 15th centuries, I conclude that the presence of an initial cluster is an important
feature in describing this class. The following section relates these instances of the
spread of <-ew> preterites to new members, to the patterns of survival of the
<-ew> preterites in original OE Class VII verbs.
3.3.3
Word Structure and the Survival of <-ew> Preterites
The principles behind the survival of infrequent verbs belonging to a given ablaut
pattern overlap with the principles behind the spread of that ablaut pattern. For
highly frequent verbs, an irregular preterite is easy to recall, because of the many
exemplars stored in the memory. For verbs of lower frequency, recall is more
difficult. This is where type frequency and phonological similarity come into play.
To take an example from the sing-cling verbs discussed in the first half of this
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chapter, it is not reasonable to suppose that clung survived in accordance with
the frequency hypothesis. In all corpora I have examined in all periods, its token
frequency is low. It is more reasonable to suppose that clung survived because
when exemplars of its preterite were too few to be accessed in a speaker’s memory,
the speaker was able to generate a preterite based on the large and robust class to
which cling belonged. In much the same way, when no exemplars of the preterite
of string could be accessed when it was first created as a denominal verb, because
no preterite had yet been uttered in the history of English, the preterite strung
was generated based on its phonological similarity to an existing class with high
type frequency.
In the case of <-ew> preterites, I argue that neither token frequency nor word
structure alone can explain the patterns of survival, but that they interacted and
reinforced each other. I repeat here the list of verbs whose survival is to be
explained: blow, crow, flow, glow, grow, know, low, mow, row, sow, and throw.
Table 3.13 in section 3.3.1 showed that the token frequencies of these verbs
in PDE correlated well with their morphological outcomes, whereas their token
frequencies in OE and ME correlated badly. Because it was in ME that the
competition between weak and strong forms led to the loss of strong forms, with
strong forms of eventual weak verbs such as mow tending to be last attested in
the 14th and 15th centuries, we must still explain the outcomes of verbs with
reference to the token frequencies of ME. While it might be the case that the 20th
century outcomes can be explained through token frequency changes over time,
the fifteenth century outcomes were much the same as they are today, but the
frequencies were very different. There are two options. One may assume that for
these particular strong verbs–but not for most of the others–the ME corpora do an
87
especially poor job of reflecting the actual frequencies in the spoken language, and
we should assume that the PDE frequency distribution held in ME as well. Or one
may look to the state of the language preserved in ME records for an explanation
based on both frequency and word structure.
For low frequency verbs, the principles behind survival overlap with these principles of productivity. In the case of crow, the token frequency was never high at
any stage in the language. I therefore treat its case as comparable to clung. When
the strong preterite crew could otherwise have been expected to disappear from
lack of sufficiently exemplars, phonological similarity to a class of similar verbs
saved it. Crew survives today, especially in British English (Welna 1996: 194) and
in usage with animals as opposed to humans (OED), contrary to the predictions
of the frequency hypothesis. In contrast, the verb low, row and mow, which have
always been of relatively low frequency, lost their strong preterites and never recovered them through the means of phonological similarity. Similarly, when the
originally high frequency verb sow declined in frequency between EME and PDE,
it failed to keep its strong preterite, because of its lack of cluster.
When verbs of originally low frequency increased in frequency, they created the
illusion in PDE that token frequencies are sufficient to explain inflectional outcome,
such that throw and grow are in PDE strong verbs of high frequency. However,
it is necessary to explain why the strong preterites threw and grew survived until
their frequency picked up. Such was not the case for all verbs that increased in
frequency, such as walk. Walk never had a robust inflectional class to fit into, so
it became weak, even though its token frequency in PDE is very high. In the case
of throw and grow, they had the consonant cluster that, like crow, permitted their
strong preterites to overcome the effects of low frequency. Blow is easy to explain,
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with both an initial consonant cluster and relatively high token frequency. Know
possessed a consonant cluster, as its spelling indicates, until EMnE. Its token
frequency is sufficiently high that we should expect it to remain strong despite its
subsequent loss of the cluster.
The contingency table in 3.14 shows the correlation between preterite and
cluster for the 12 inherited strong verbs under consideration.
Table 3.14: Cluster ∼ Outcome Correlation
Cluster
No Cluster
Strong
know, grow, throw, blow, crow
Weak
glow, flow
sow, hew, mow, low, row
Such an arrangement requires the use of the ME data, for in OE low, hlōwan,
had a cluster, and beginning in EME, know had no cluster. The fact that it
is precisely the ME data that exhibit the best fit for presence and absence of
clusters is encouraging for this hypothesis. It is precisely in ME that the cluster
was demonstrably important for productivity, and it is in ME that strong verbs
without the cluster began to become predominantly weak.
I thus argue that the presence or absence of a consonant cluster, in company
with token frequency, governed the survival of strong inflection in the <-ew> verbs,
just as it governed the attraction of new verbs into the class. Two exceptions
remain: flow and glow, which became weak despite the presence of a cluster, and
in the case of flow, despite relatively high token frequency. The following section
offers an idiosyncratic explanation for each of these verbs.
89
3.3.4
Exceptions to the Word Structure Hypothesis
Flow
In order to understand why flew did not survive as the preterite of flow, the form
should be considered in the context of four similar-sounding strong verbs, fly, flee,
flay and flow. All four were strong verbs in OE, and conjugated with the pattern
shown in table 3.15. Fly and flee were so similar that the MED categorizes forms
as belonging to one or the other headword according to semantics rather than
according to form, and even then the distinctions may be fuzzy.
Table 3.15: Fly, flee, flow, flay
Infinitive
‘flow’ flōwan
‘fly’
flēogan
‘flee’ flēon
‘flay’ flēan
Pret. Sg
flēow
flēah
flēah
flōg
Pret. Pl.
flēowon
flugon
flugon
flōgon
Past. Part.
flōwen
flogen
flogen
flagen
At one time or another, all exhibited the preterite flew. Flow, originally a
Class VII verb, inherited flew. According to the OED, it disappeared by the 13th
century. Flay, it was seen in section 3.3.2, acquired the preterite flew in the 14th
century. Fly, as has also been stated, acquired flew in the 15th century. At the
same time as, and probably not independently from, fly, flee also acquired flew.
The confusion of forms and meanings is so great that I hesitate to claim flee as a
separate instance of a verb acquiring flew. This rather confusing state of affairs is
presented graphically in Table 3.16.
In PDE, fly and flee have largely differentiated their semantics, and the preterite
of the former is flew and of the latter is fled. The fact that a weak preterite won
out over all of the several strong preterites of flee, is attributed by the MED (s.v.
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Table 3.16: Attestations of flew
13th cent.
‘flow’ X
‘flay’
‘flee’
‘fly’
14th cent.
15th cent.
X
X
X
X
flēn) attributes to the desire to differentiate flee and fly. In other words, avoidance of homophony is at work here. I submit that if, in the 13th centuries and
following, flee was being differentiated from fly through the introduction of a weak
preterite, the same thing might have been happening to flow. It was in the 13th
century that the past participles came to coincide, the <og> of flogen ‘flown (fly)’
and the /o:w/ of flowen ’flowed’ merging in /Ou/ (Lass 1992: 50-52). Additionally,
we have seen that flee, hand-in-hand with fly and flay, acquired a strong preterite
flew by analogy with the verbs of Class VII, which includes flow. The evidence
suggests that all four verbs were intertwined, with flee and fly the most similar,
flow somewhat less so, and flay still more distant.
Given all the confusion among four verbs, and the fact that fly and flee fell together in various dialects of English and other Germanic languages, the triumph of
both weak preterites fled and flowed may be explained by avoidance of homophony.
Glow
Glow has always been a low frequency verb, so it is not altogether surprising that
it should be weak in PDE. However, the same holds true for crow, which has retained its strong preterite to a surprising degree, though it is on the decline, and
it is a safe prediction that crew will be the next preterite of this class to disap-
91
pear. The hypothesis that the word structure, in the form of a consonant cluster,
played a role in preserving strong inflection does not account for the loss of glew.
The OED, independently of any hypothesis about consonant clusters, proposes
that the word may not be descended from OE glōwan, but from a Scandinavian
borrowing. Their reasoning is that the word is weak in all Germanic languages
except English, and in English after OE. If the word were descended from the
OE strong verb, a strong outcome would be expected. A sizable number of verbs,
including give and get, were borrowed from Scandinavian and came to replace the
existing inherited cognate, and glow might be one of these. The OED’s claim that
glow is “weak after OE” is not entirely accurate, as attestations of glew exist in
the 15th century, though weak preterites are attested earlier, in the 14th century.
Such late attestations, however, can be explained in the same way as the unoriginal preterites snew, drew, etc. In the cases of verbs with consonant clusters that
inherited <-ew> preterites, strong preterites are attested at least as early as weak
preterites in ME. In the case of glow, its ME attestations resemble a verb that
began as a weak verb and later acquired strong <-ew> preterites by analogy, like
claw.
The explanation is admittedly ad hoc, but it was proposed by the editors of
the OED presumably without any thought of the consonant cluster hypothesis, it
is consonant with the Germanic data, and it explains a weak outcome even more
surprising in light of the consonant cluster in glow.
3.3.5
Motivations
Having claimed that an initial consonant cluster helps many strong verbs to survive, I now offer and evaluate possible explanations for why the cluster should be
92
of such importance. It is especially surprising that the onset should be so prominent, as it is usually the coda that is salient in such cases. The unexpectedness
of the role of the onset is discussed in Bybee and Moder (1983: 141). In their
case, they had found the cluster to be one of the features, though not a sine qua
non, that correlates with membership in the sing-cling verb class. For supporting evidence, they pointed to a study by Zubin and Koepcke (1981) on German
nouns, which found a correlation between masculine gender and the presence of a
consonant cluster. To these examples, I add the case of English verbs with <-ew>
preterites.
I divide possible psycholinguistic motivations for preferring strong preterites
with an initial consonant cluster into two categories, distributional and functional.
I define a distributional account as one where the correlation between a feature
and a category developed as an accident of the language, from the particular
combination of the frequencies of phonemes, sequences, and words in the language.
Cue validity is an example of a distributional account. If we argue that preterites
in -ung are favored because few English nouns and adjectives end in -ung, we are
making a prediction that in a different English, one in which that nouns ending
in -ung abounded while those ending in -ang were rare, preterites in -ang would
be preferred.
In contrast, I define a functional account as one that proposes that a feature
has some inherent property that affects its behavior. For example, an argument
that long vowels are preferred to short vowels in some contexts because their
greater duration allows them to be better heard by the listener is a functional
account. It is an inherent property of long vowels that they are longer than
short vowels, independent of the structure of the language. In the following two
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subsections, I present and evaluate both functional and distributional accounts for
the importance of the initial consonant cluster in <-ew> verbs.
Functional
Here I present two possible functional explanations for the relevance of the initial
consonant cluster that have been proposed. The evidence weighs against the first,
but the second possibility remains, according to current knowledge, open.
Bybee and Slobin (1982) conducted an experiment in which they found that the
less a verb’s preterite resembled its present, the more difficult it was for children to
produce the preterite when given the present. Children had the greatest difficulty
with suppletive and very irregular preterites such as went and made, and more
difficulty with words that lack codas, such as blow, know, and see, than with
words that have codas, such as break, sing, and bite. Bybee and Slobin concluded
that the more consonantal structure a verb has, the more irregularity it tolerates,
because “a greater phonological distance makes the accessing task more difficult”
(113). If this should be the case, then it would be reasonable to extrapolate that
speakers can be sensitive to even finer distinctions, such as that between the single
shared consonant of sow and sew, and the two shared consonants of grow and grew.
However, doubt is cast on such a hypothesis by Rumelhart and McClelland
(1987). They constructed a connectionist model which simulated the learning of
English past tenses, and their learner similarly had the greatest difficulty with
suppletive and very irregular preterites. However, because their model was always
given the present and preterite together, the difficulty was not with connecting
the two. As a result, they interpreted these results differently. They conclude
that it is not that the degree of difference between preterite and present regulates
94
the difficulty of the accessing task, but that irregular preterites have low type
frequency. This low type frequency is what makes them more difficult to learn.
Subsequently, Bybee and Newman (1995) addressed the question of whether
stem changes are inherently more difficult to master than affixation processes. In
a connectionist model, both are handled by the same mechanism. Bybee and
Newman, therefore, investigated why stem changes often do turn out to be more
difficult to learn than affixes, and as a result of their experiments, they concluded
that it is the lower type frequency of the stem changes that are to blame. Therefore, the evidence is weak that mow, sow, low, and row became weak because the
lack of an initial consonant cluster made it more difficult for speakers to access
the preterite, given the present.
If the strength of the phonological connection between the preterite and present,
however, is of dubious relevance, the connection between preterite and preterite
may still be important. In a connectionist framework, using product-oriented
schemas, preterites such as drew and slew are generated because of their similarity
to existing preterites. The stronger the phonological similarities, the more likely
the new preterite is to be generated. It is an inherent property of consonant clusters that they create the possibility of longer identical sequences. A verb with the
shape C1 ew can have consonants in common only with homophones of itself. A
verb C1 C2 ew, however, can have the sequence C2 ew in common with many verbs.
Thus drew shared the sequence /reu/ with several verbs, such as threw, grew, and
crew. It is thus more phonologically reinforced than a verb with a more limited
structure, such as bow, could ever be. In a rule-based framework such as that of
Albright and Hayes (2003), the advantage of the cluster could be encapsulated by
positing that speakers arrive at two rules, one general rule that generates <-ew>
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preterites, and another rule that generates them in a context following /r/. Two
rules are better than one. The consonant cluster provides an inherent potential
functional advantage, the possibility of more similar verbs, which is realized by
the distributional facts of the language, namely the existence of such verbs.
Distributional
Parallel to the argument that cue validity played a role in the favoring of -ung
preterites over ang preterites, this section argues that cue validity played a role in
favoring <-ew> preterites with a cluster over those without.
The evidence supports the hypothesis that in ME, the distributional facts
of English were such that the structure CCew correlated well with preterites,
while the structure Cew did not. I obtained the distributional facts by searching
the MED for word-final instances of the orthographic sequences <eu>, <eue>,
<eugh>, <eu3>, <euh>, <eouh>, <eoue>, <iu>, <iue>, <ew>, <ewe>, <eowe>,
<eowæ>, <eou>, these being the spellings that the MED lists for the preterite of
knouen ‘know’. I used know because its token frequency is the highest of the verbs
with <ew> preterites, and therefore it includes the greatest variety of spellings
in its preterites. I reduced the list to the words that were pronounced with /eu/
rather than /iu/ or /Eu/. Table 3.17 presents the number of lexemes in the MED
that had a form in CCew or Cew, according to whether they were strong preterites
or not. Table 3.18 presents the number of hits of CCew and Cew forms when
searches were carried out in LAEME on the words represented in Table 3.17.
The percentages in the third row reflect a measure of cue validity. In this
case, the cue is the word structure CCew or Cew, and the category is the set of
strong preterites. CCew was a better predictor of the category preterite than Cew,
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Table 3.17: MED CCew Types vs. Cew Types
CCew
Strong Preterite
141
Other
123
% Strong Preterite 54%
Cew
62
184
25%
Table 3.18: LAEME CCew Tokens vs. Cew Tokens
Preterite
Other
% Preterite
CCew
62
170
27%
Cew
15
192
7%
because if an EME speaker heard a form with the structure CCew, there was a
27% chance that it was a strong preterite, whereas there was only a 7% chance that
the Cew corresponded to a strong preterite. A z-test shows that the difference is
statistically significant, with a confidence level approaching 100%. The numbers of
types in Table 3.17 are too small to support high confidence levels, but I include
the figures, because some of these types represent forms that do not appear in
English until after the period covered by LAEME, or do not appear due to low
token frequency. The data may be of interest to other scholars.
3.4
Conclusions
Two sets of English strong verbs have been presented, which behave in similar
ways. In both sets, token frequency alone is inadequate to predict fully which
verbs retained their strong inflection and which have become weak. Though the
PDE frequencies for the <-ew> verbs give the illusion of near perfect prediction,
97
they conceal several changes in relative frequency. Frequencies at earlier stages
of the language fail to explain the behavior of the verbs at earlier stages of the
language. For an account with more predictive power, the structure of the words
must be taken into account. In some cases of very high or low frequency, such
as know and low, outcome correlates perfectly with token frequency at all stages
of the language. In other cases, the word structure reinforced the preterite of a
low-frequency verb. Of these, some, such as grow, increased their frequency over
time, whereas others, such as crow, did not.
In both sets of strong verbs, the presence of an initial consonant cluster was
found to be relevant, in support of increasing evidence that the rime is not the
only part of the word relevant for inflectional morphology. Bybee and Moder
(1983) studied the sing-cling verbs, and they concluded that English exhibits a
sort of “whole-word morphology”, gestalt-like, in which morphological information
is not concentrated at the end of the word, but spread out over the entire word.
My research on the <-ew> verbs supports this view of English morphology. The
favored structure for preterites was expressed in terms of the entire word, CCew,
which encapsulates the initial consonant cluster, the nucleus, and the lack of coda.
It may be the case that the onset became all the more important because of the
lack of any coda.
These are the aspects of the methodology that I wish to place particular emphasis on, for they fill gaps in the previous literature. First, the importance of
looking for any possible frequency changes over time, a practice that has been carried out neither by theoretical linguists nor by scholars of the history of English.
Second, the importance of taking into account both frequency and phonological
similarity, something that has been carried out better by in the field of linguistics
98
than in the history of English. Third, the similarity of the operative principles
governing survival and productivity of strong inflection. The effects of word structure on productivity of irregular inflection and its interaction with frequency have
been well studied by Bybee, but less thoroughly for its effects on survival.
99
Chapter 4
Vowel Quantity
4.1
Introduction
This chapter addresses the role of vowel quantity in the history of strong verbs: in
determining the PDE status of a verb as strong or weak; in generating a slew of
competing strong preterites for many Middle English (ME) verbs; and in making
the eventual selection of one of those strong preterites for most verbs that remain
strong in the standard dialect.
The first section presents a history of phonological changes to the quantity of
vowels and illustrates how these changes affected verbal inflection. There follows
a description of various forms that arose through morphological changes, and of
the resulting state of affairs, where most verbs exhibited a variety of vocalisms
in their preterites and past participles. I explain the dialectal origin of some of
these changes, and how they spread beyond their original borders. In section 4.5,
I argue that the rise of some of these forms, and the eventual reduction of the free
variation to only one possible preterite, makes sense if long vowels were preferred
100
in strong verb preterites. In some cases, the preference for long vowels arose
primarily for distributional reasons, when forms were under pressure to be more
like other strong verb forms. In other cases, long vowels were preferred primarily
because of their greater perceptual salience. The motivations for the effects of
vowel quantity are treated in section 4.6.
Under consideration are the verbs that conform to the general patterns of
classes I-V. I adduce evidence from Class VI verbs to help explain the behavior of
classes I-V, but the behavior of Class VI verbs themselves is treated in Chapter
2. For similar reasons, I disregard very high frequency verbs such as see, sit, lie,
and come, which, although they were members of these classes, exhibited various
phonological and morphological anomalies, and which probably neither influenced
nor were influenced by the rest of the verbs in their classes.
4.2
Phonological Changes
In ME, a series of phonological changes, listed below, applied to the vowels, causing
much disruption to the ablaut patterns of the strong verbs. These changes are
listed below in chronological order and then described.
• Homorganic Cluster Lengthening
• Pre-Cluster Shortening
• Monophthongization of OE diphthongs
• /a:/ > /O:/
• Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening
101
The simplest of these changes is the unconditioned shift of /a:/ to /O:/. Monophthongization of Old English (OE) diphthongs took place in the south18 in the 11th
century, turning <ēo> /ea/ into /e:/, <ēa> /æa/ into /E:/ and <ea> /ĕo/ into
/E/.
Vowels were lengthened, and lowered slightly, in an environment traditionally
described as an open syllable, a change the textbooks style Middle English Open
Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL). Minkova (1982) argues that a restriction of the
environment is necessary, but for the nonce, “open syllable” makes an adequate
first approximation of the environment, though it will be necessary to refine the
rule later.
Similar is Homorganic Cluster Lengthening (HCL). Because this is primarily a
morphological work, the phonological imprecision of the name HCL and its traditional description need not be treated in detail. It is sufficient to list the changes
that affected the strong verbs. For further discussion of the rule from a phonological perspective, see Stockwell and Minkova (1992). All vowels were subject to
lengthening before /–ld/, though not without sporadic exceptions19 . High vowels lengthened before /nd/. Lengthening of at least some vowels, as evidenced by
spellings such as <soong>, took place before /ng/, but then shortened again. Low
vowels did not undergo lengthening. It is unclear exactly what happened before
<mb>, although it is certain that the infinitive of climb underwent lengthening.
Before other clusters, short vowels remained short, and long vowels shortened.
4.2.1
Class I
Class I verbs had /O:/ in the preterite singular after the application of [4], and a
long vowel in the infinitive and by implication, in the present, after the application
102
of MEOSL [5]. Because MEOSL failed to apply consistently to high vowels, the
past participles of ME exhibited variation. Even as late as Caxton are found the
lengthened variants with /e:/, such as wrēten, alongside unlengthened variants
such as written (Lass 1992: 131). Table 4.1 shows the vocalisms of OE and the
new vocalisms of ME, including the uncertainty of quantity in the ME preterite
plural and past participle.
Table 4.1: Class I
drive infinitive preterite singular
OE
dri:van
dra:f
ME
dri:v@n
drO:f
4.2.2
preterite plural
drivon
driv@n (dre:v@n)
past participle
driven
driv@n(dre:v@n)
Class II
Class II verbs, after the monophthongization of OE diphthongs [3], had [e:] in the
infinitive and present, and [E:] in the preterite singular. MEOSL [5] applied in
the past participle, leading to /O:/. Lengthening from MEOSL is expected in the
preterite plural, although it ends up mostly obscured due to a tendency to level the
vowel of either the past participle or the preterite singular into the preterite plural.
The Middle English Dictionary (MED) records some early forms such as <curen>
and <cusen>, but <chōsen>, with /O:/ from the participle, predominates. The
hypothetically lengthened and lowered version is therefore asterisked. Table 4.2
compares the ablaut patterns of OE and ME. Note also the consonantal leveling
of Verner’s Law, extending the /z/ throughout the paradigm. The original /r/
remains in isolated forms such as lovelorn.
103
Table 4.2: Class II
freeze infinitive preterite singular
OE
freozan
fræas
ME
fre:z@n
frE:s
4.2.3
preterite plural
fruron
*frO:z@n
past participle
froren
frO:z@n
Class III
Class III verbs ultimately splintered as a result of Homorganic Cluster Lengthening. At first, the infinitive, preterite plural, and past participle of verbs ending in /nd/ and /ŋg/ lengthened. The long vowels before /ŋg/ then shortened.
Ultimately, due to this shortening, the two stem types ended up with different
patterns.
The preterite singular vowel /a/ did not lengthen, being a low vowel and therefore not subject to HCL. An allophone of /a/ before nasals did exist, dating back to
Mercian in OE, and continuing in the West Midlands dialect of ME (Wright 1925:
42). This allophone was [O]. There is evidence from spellings such as <foond>
and <soong> that this /O/ allophone was subject to HCL, but /O/ before a nasal
eventually lost out to its competitor /a/, such that the variants man and land
were selected over the variants mon and lond. The one environment in which /O/
persisted was before /ŋg/, such that the variants long and strong were selected
over lang and strang. However, in the preterite singular of class III verbs, the
/a/ variant won out even before /ŋg/, such that the variant sprang was selected
over the variant sprong20 . Tables 4.3 and 4.4 show the development of ablaut in
Class III verbs subject to HCL. Wright (1923: 38-39) asserts that the lengthening
was undone by the middle of the fourteenth century. The use of digraphs in later
104
authors, such as Chaucer21 , may therefore reflect conservative orthography, or a
sporadic lengthening in this environment.
Table 4.3: Class IIIa
sing
OE
ME pre-1350
ME post-1350
infinitive
siŋgan
si:ŋgen
sI:ŋgen
preterite singular
saŋg
saŋg, sO:ŋg
saŋg
preterite plural
suŋgon
su:ŋgen
suŋgen
past participle
suŋgen
su:ŋgen
suŋgen
Table 4.4: Class IIIb
bind
OE
ME
infinitive preterite singular
bindan
band
bi:nden
band, bO:nd
preterite plural
bundon
bu:nden
past participle
bunden
bu:nden
In the set of Class III strong verbs where the final cluster was not homorganic,
HCL never applied. Furthermore, had there ever been any long vowels there, they
would have been shortened through the application of [2], pre-cluster shortening.
Table 4.5 shows the essential continuity of the ablaut pattern.
Table 4.5: Class IIIc
help
OE
ME
4.2.4
infinitive preterite singular
helpan
hælp
help@n
halp
preterite plural
hulpon
hulp@n
past participle
holpen
holp@n
Classes IV and V
As noted in the introduction, Classes IV and V in OE differed only in the past
participle, where Class IV had /o/ and Class V had /e/. Elsewhere they were
identical. This overlap in paradigms led to some interchange between the classes,
where verbs that properly belonged to Class IV exhibit some occurrences of /e/
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in their participles, and vice versa. The ME phonological change that affected the
verbs of these classes is MEOSL, which lengthened the vowels of the infinitive and
past participle, but not of the preterite singular. The preterite plural had /æ:/ in
OE, which was raised in ME to /E:/, but its quantity was left untouched by ME
lengthenings and shortenings. Tables 4.6 and 4.7 show the OE and ME ablaut.
Table 4.6: Class IV
break infinitive preterite singular
OE
brekan
bræk
ME
brE:k@n
brak
preterite plural
bræ:kon
brE:k@n
past participle
broken
brO:k@n
Table 4.7: Class V
weave
OE
ME
4.2.5
infinitive preterite singular
wevan
wæf
wE:v@n
waf
preterite plural
wæ:von
wE:v@n
past participle
weven
wE:v@n
ClassVI
MEOSL also lengthened the vowels of the infinitive and past participle in Class
VI. The preterite was already long in the singular and plural, and it remained so.
Table 4.8 shows the OE and ME ablaut.
Table 4.8: Class V
(for)sake infinitive preterite singular
OE
sakan
so:k
ME
sa:k@n
so:k
preterite plural
so:kon
so:k@n
past participle
saken
sa:k@n
Such are the expected outcomes of the ME strong verb classes I-VI after the
application of sound changes. These phonologically regular patterns, though, were
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subject to extensive morphological change. In addition to acquiring weak forms,
these verbs acquired multiple vocalisms in the strong preterites and past participles. By the end of ME, most verbs exhibited a bewildering array of forms,
detailed in the following section.
4.3
Analogical Changes
Analogical changes to the ablaut patterns in the strong verbs were present already
in OE. ME saw an upswing in the number of possible variants for a given element
in the paradigm. This is no doubt partly because of an increase in the size of the
attested corpus, which allowed the written record to capture more of the variety
of the spoken language, including variants particular to different dialects. It is
also partly because further analogies applied during ME, leaving fifteenth-century
speakers with more options for the preterites of many verbs than twelfth-speakers
had. The current section of this chapter details the new variants that arose for
analogical reasons and were added to the phonologically regular forms. For Early
Middle English (EME), the data are taken from the Linguistic Atlas of Early
Middle English (LAEME), and for the end of ME, the results of Long (1944) are
used. Long (1944) is a reference work containing all of the strong verb forms found
by the author in a fifteenth-century corpus. The disadvantage of its methodology
is that token frequencies are not given, only the number of texts in which a form
occurs. However, since the present work is interested primarily in which analogies
took place, and only secondarily in the relative frequency of variants, the usefulness
of Long (1944) was deemed sufficient to outweigh the time and effort required to
replicate the research.
107
4.3.1
General Remarks
In ME, there was a general tendency for the 2nd person preterite singular to be
leveled under the vowel of the 1st and 3rd preterite singular, so that there was a
single form of the stem for the preterite singular.22 The vocalism of the 1st and
3rd preterite singular won out over the vocalism of the 2nd singular. Presumably
the greater token frequency of these slots in the paradigm, as seen in Table 4.9,
played a role.
Table 4.9: 2nd sg. vs. 1st and 3rd sg.
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Total
I: rise
II: flee
III: (be)gin
IV: come
V: see
VI: stand
VII: let
1st & 3rd singular preterite
99
33
269
1027
418
259
163
2268
2nd singular preterite
1
0
1
26
36
8
8
80
However, the nature of the written records means that the frequency of the
2nd singular in the spoken language is underrepresented in the corpus. In spite
of the inadequacy of the written records, we may point to a general linguistic
tendency for the 3rd singular to serve as the basis for analogy. Watkins (1969:
90) writes, “It is the 3 sg. which will tend to impose its form on the rest of the
paradigm, irrespective of the form of the 2 sg. or any other person, owing to the
peculiar functional position of the 3 sg. as ’la personne zéro’, ’la non-personne’, as
Benveniste has put it.” See further in Watkins (91ff) for an account of the nature
of the 3 sg.
Subsequent to the leveling of the preterite singular, the tendency was for the
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preterite singular and plural to be leveled under a single form, which led to the
reduction of the strong verb system from four principal parts in OE to three in
Present Day English (PDE). Because the preterite plural was less frequent than
the preterite singular, the resulting uniform preterite usually had the vowel of
the preterite singular rather than that of the preterite plural. Cases where the
preterite singular appears to have acquired the vowel of the preterite plural are
rare and require special explanation.
4.3.2
Class I
Of the classes under consideration in this chapter, Class I was the most stable.
For the most part, the preterite singular and the past participle were conservative.
In keeping with the general tendency to level the preterite singular and plural into
a single preterite form, the preterite plural acquired the vowel of the preterite
singular. Thus, PDE has “he rose” and “they rose” instead of the phonologically
regular outcome “he rose” and “they ris”.
The fifteenth century data in Long (1944) show the existence of some limited
analogies that are not found in LAEME. In rare cases, the vowel of the preterite has
been extended to the past participle, as in droven, and vice versa, as in smit. Table
4.10 shows the occurrences of analogical extensions vs. forms with conservative
ablaut in LAEME and Long. The numbers in the columns for LAEME represent
token frequency counts for the verbs bide, drive, glide, gripe, ride, rise, shine,
slide, stride, write, and writhe. Unfortunately, as noted above, the numbers from
Long do not represent token frequencies, but the number of texts in which a form
occurs. If a single text contains both inherited and analogically extended forms
for a single principal part, that text is counted twice. This is not an ideal method
109
of representing the data, but it follows from the methodology of Long23 .
Table 4.10: Class I analogy
Conservative
vowel
LAEME
Pret. Sg.
249
100%
Pret. Pl.
49
88%
Past Part. 200
100%
Conservative
vowel
Long (1944)
188
90%
49
40%
213
98%
Analogically
extended vowel
LAEME
0
0%
7
12%
0
0%
Analogically
extended vowel
Long (1944)
211
10%
75
60%
4
2%
From the numbers in Table 10, we can characterize the data in the following
manner: analogical extensions are more common at the end of ME than in Early
Middle English (EME), but they remain exceptional outside the leveling of the
preterite plural under the vowel of the preterite singular. In all cases where the /i/
of the past participle has been extended to the preterite singular1, the root ends in
a dental. Thus writ is a possible preterite, but driv is not. The variation in Class
I verbs by the end of ME is shown in Table 4.11, using write as the exemplum.
Table 4.11: Class I Variation
Pret. Sg.
write wrO:t, writ
4.3.3
Pret. Pl.
writ@n, wrO:t@n
Past Part.
writ@n, wrE:t@n, wrO:t@n
Class II
Class II was rather less conservative than Class I. In addition to the leveling of
the preterite plural under the vowel of the preterite singular, several other analogical extensions were made during the course of ME. Spreading of vowels from the
110
preterite to the past participle and vice versa were found, as well as spreading of
vowels from Class IV and V verbs. The former is an intra-paradigmatic analogy
and the latter inter-paradigmatic. Table 12 illustrates the distribution of conservative and analogically spread vowels in the LAEME corpus and the fifteenth
century corpus of Long (1944). The verbs used for the LAEME searches are bid
(bēodan), brook, choose, cleave (clēofan), creep, freeze, reek, shoot, shove, and
seethe. Verbs with stems ending originally in /w/ and /g/ are excluded because
of the diphthongizations that took place in EME. When the shape of the root was
changed, the verbs no longer resembled the other Class II verbs and no longer
behaved as members of the class.
Table 4.12: Class II analogy
Conservative
LAEME
Pret. Sg.
67
Pret. Pl.
13
Past Part. 130
Intra
Long LAEME
40
4
0
13
151
3
Inter
Long LAEME
27
4
42
0
5
0
Long
27
2
0
Class II displays the same trend as Class I, an increase in analogical extension.
The increase is not only in the percentage of forms that are the result of analogies,
for which Long’s data are not numerically reliable, but also in the variety of
analogical changes. In Long’s corpus, there were no instances of the inherited
preterite plural; rather, there were three analogically produced forms: the /e:/ of
the preterite singular, the /O:/ of the past participle, and the /a:/ borrowed from
the preterite plural of Class IV and V verbs (see section 3.5 below). The first
two are instances of intra-paradigmatic analogy, and the third inter-paradigmatic.
The inter-paradigmatic analogy is not found at all in LAEME, having not arisen
or not become frequent until a later period.
111
In the LAEME corpus, there are no instances where the /O:/ has been spread
to the preterite singular. Such preterites, e.g. froze and chose, are attested later
in ME, alongside forms such as chese24 . In Early Modern English (EMnE), forms
with /O:/ dominate. The only preterite of choose in the King James Version is
chose. Only rarely was the /e:/ of the preterite singular extended to the past
participle in any period. There are no instances of chesen or ceren in LAEME. In
Long’s corpus (1944: 276), there are 5 texts with instances of Class II participles
with /e:/, out of 193 total texts with Class II participles. In addition to the intraparadigmatic extension of the /O:/ from the Class II past participle to the preterite
singular, the inter-paradigmatic /a:/ of the Class IV and V preterite singular (see
section 3.5 below) was also extended to the Class II preterite singular. In the
preterite singular, the short counterparts of all three vowels, /a/, /e/, and /O/,
are found. These arose phonologically, through a sporadic shortening of vowels in
monosyllabic words ending in a single consonant.
This proliferation of analogical extensions led to the variation of forms given
in Table 4.13. The exemplum given is freeze, which was the most morphologically
and phonologically conservative member of Class II, though its token frequency
is so low that most forms listed are hypothetical, not necessarily representing
real attestations. Forms not found in Long, LAEME, or the MED are asterisked.
Of the distribution of forms, both phonologically regular and morphologically
extended, Long (1944: 39) writes, “As the preterite singular forms with the stem
vowels a, e, o, both long and short are widely spread and intermingle in the same
texts, no conclusions can be drawn regarding dialectal distribution from these
examples.”
112
Table 4.13: Class II Variation
Pret. Sg.
Pret. Pl.
Past Part.
freeze frE:z, *fra:z, *frO:z, *frE:z@n, *fra:z@n, *frE:z@n, frO:z@n
*frEz, *fraz, *frOz
*frO:z@n
4.3.4
Class III /nd/ verbs
In Class III verbs ending in /nd/, we can easily identify a dialectal distribution
for the direction in which analogy spread through the paradigm. The tendency in
the north was to extend the /a/ of the preterite singular to the preterite plural.
The tendency in the south, especially the west, was to extend the /u:/ of the past
participle to the preterite (Lass 1992: 132). The preterite singular, descended
from OE /and/, had multiple outcomes in ME. The rounded allophone of /a/ that
occurred before a nasal has been referenced in section 2.3, /O/. This produced a
qualitative alternation of fand /fand/ vs. fond /fOnd/.
Homorganic Cluster Lengthening of /O/ produced a quantitative alternation,
for there is evidence that both /fOnd/ and /fO:nd/ occurred. The frequent spelling
<oond>, referred to in 4.2.3, points to the existence of forms with a long vowel.
Though the Class III preterites ending in <ond> are listed exclusively by the MED
with a macron, indicating a long vowel, it is possible to argue indirectly that short
vowel variants existed. Preterites of /-nd/ verbs often rhyme with nouns in -and/ond25 , such as hand/hond, band/bond and land/lond. Though the MED entries for
these also are given only with macrons, they must have had short vowel variants,
as the PDE outcomes are hand, band, and land, with short vowels. The editors
of the MED are probably making too much of the <oond> spellings by assuming
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that all <ond> spellings also represented long vowels.
Moreover, preterites ending in /and/, which existed only with a short vowel,
probably outnumbered preterites with /O(:)/ throughout England. It was not
possible to get frequency counts for the preterites, but LALME shows that even
in the west, instances of /a/ outumbered instances of /O/ in man/mon. We can
also argue from the PDE outcome of nouns like man, hand, band, and land, where
/a/ won out over /O/, presumably for reasons of frequency.
To conclude, the preterite singular of Class III /-nd/ had a short vowel always
in the north, where HCL did not apply in this environment, and more often than
not in the south. It is this inherited short vowel that eventually loses to the long
vowel of the past participle in the south, resulting in PDE find ∼ found rather
than find ∼ fand.
Both the northern and the western preterite are exhibited already in LAEME.
Table 4.14 shows the distribution of inherited and analogical preterites for the
verbs bind, find, grind, and wind in LAEME and Long (1944).
Table 4.14: Class III analogy
Conservative
vowel
LAEME
Pret. Sg.
116
Pret. Pl.
114
Past Part. 172
Conservative
vowel
Long (1944)
64
31
240
Analogically
extended vowel
LAEME
28
13
0
Analogically
extended vowel
Long (1944)
12
13
1
At no point is the /a/ of the preterite extended into the past participle. There
is one instance in Long’s corpus of a past participle <boond>, which appears
to have its source in the preterite singular. It is also conceivable, though not
likely, that it represents the regular /u:/, because /u/ is often orthographically
114
represented as <o> before <n>. It is interesting, as Long notes (1944: 74), that
even by the fifteenth century, the preterite has not yet been leveled under a single
form. One might ask whether the preterites had been leveled differently in the
north and the west, and whether the conflation of the two dialects into a single
corpus is what leads to the appearance that leveling had not yet taken place; yet
this is not so. In fifteenth-century western texts, the spelling <oond> is frequent
in the preterite singular, reflecting a phonologically regular long vowel resulting
from HCL. This frequent form has not yet been fully replaced by the /u:/ from the
past participle. The set of possible forms, with find as the exemplum, is presented
in Table 4.15.
Table 4.15: Class III variation
find
4.3.5
Pret. Sg.
fand26 , fOnd, fO:nd,
fu:nd
Pret. Pl.
fand@n27 , fOnd@n,
fO:nd@n,
fu:nd@n
Past Part.
fu:nden
fO:nd@n28
Other Class III Verbs
Most Class III verbs ending in a liquid + consonant cluster became weak early in
ME. Even the highest frequency verbs, such as help, are weak in PDE, outside of
certain dialects, such as Appalachian, which is a conservative area preserving features of Early Modern British English (Dictionary of American Regional English).
Because of the strong preterite’s low number of attestations, it has less opportunity to show as much variation in the vowel as in other verb classes. The /O/ of
the past participle sometimes spread to the preterite, as in holp. A dialectal reflex
of the inherited preterite singular sometimes appears in texts from the southwest
115
of England, resulting in help rather than halp. Class III verbs ending in nasals
and nasal + velar sequences, such as swim and swing, are treated in Chapter 3.
They still form the largest and most productive class of strong verbs, as defined
by experimental tests and analogical extensions to other verbs. Tables for the
variation in these two sets of class III verbs have been deemed of limited use and
are not included.
4.3.6
Classes IV and V
4.2.4 Class IV and V verbs are treated as a unit, because the first three of their four
principal parts were the same, and there was much interchange between the two
in the fourth. These verbs underwent even more analogies than the Class II verbs,
and the result in the fifteenth century is a bewildering array of variation. Before
figures for these can be computed, the difficulties in determining what orthography
represents the inherited vowel and what represents an analogical extension must
be addressed. In the preterite singular, the OE vowel was /æ/, whose ME outcome
was /a/. Thus forms with <æ> and <a> are both treated as having preserved
the inherited vowel. However, the <e> spelling is also common in LAEME, and
as noted by Fisiak (1968: 18), <e> often represents /a/, which was a front vowel.
With the previous data in this chapter suggesting that the preterite singular forms
in LAEME have undergone relatively few analogies, I treat forms with <e> as
conservative. However, there are a handful of examples with <e> and <a> that
have an <e> at the end of the word, indicating the stem vowel is long. These
vowels are treated as analogical, in quantity if not necessarily in quality.
Along similar lines, in the preterite plural, the expected outcome of OE /æ:/
is /E:/, which is usually spelled with <e>, but in early texts is also spelled with
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<a> in the South-East Midlands (Fisiak 1968: 38). Later in ME, however, the
preterite plural was subject to the usual leveling under a single preterite form, and
/a:/ is often the vowel used for the preterite singular and plural. Thus, in EMnE,
the King James Bible has “he spake” and “they spake”. Therefore in LAEME, I
treat the /a:/ in the preterite plural as conservative, and in Long, I treat /a:/ as
analogical. The relative distribution of analogical and inherited forms, computed
using these criteria for the verbs bear, break, mete, shear, speak, steal, tear, tread,
weave, and wreak, are presented in Table 4.16.
Table 4.16: Classes IV and V Analogy
Conservative
vowel
LAEME
Pret. Sg.
432
Pret. Pl.
155
Past Part. 194
Conservative
vowel
Long (1944)
50
9
202
Analogically
extended vowel
LAEME
9
11
15
Analogically
extended vowel
Long (1944)
79
57
55
The table indicates that relatively few analogies had applied to the forms in
the LAEME corpus. Only a handful of examples of /O:/ spreading to the preterite
or a Class V participle are to be found, and other variations in vowel quality have
been treated as orthographic. The increase of analogical forms by the fifteenth
century cannot be computed precisely using the data from Long, both because
of the lack of token frequencies and because our methodology treats all cases of
preterite plural /a:/ as analogical when some may conceivably be orthographic.
However, the existence of the increase is indisputable. The /O:/ is frequent in the
preterites and participles of all verbs in Long’s corpus, including verbs where /E:/
and its frequency continued to rise after ME until it replaced all other variants.
The /a:/, analogical in both the preterite singular and the preterite plural, rose
117
in frequency. Barely to be found in LAEME, at least in the preterite singular,
the preterite with /a:/ in the King James Bible constitutes the only possible past
tense for “speak”. The origin of the /a:/ is not clear, but it is most likely a simple
lengthening of the inherited /a/ in the preterite singular, motivated by the long
vowels elsewhere in the paradigm. Spreading a vowel from the preterite singular
to the preterite plural is a frequent occurrence, as has been seen, and that would
account for the /a:/ in the preterite plural.
Forms of disputed origin with /E:/ in the preterite singular arose sometime
between the end of the period covered by LAEME and the fifteenth century, which
means the fourteenth century. Long attributes the /E:/ to the influence of the
preterite plural, but this is unlikely due to the low frequency of preterite plurals.
In no other case did the preterite plural influence the preterite singular, except
where the vowel of the preterite plural was identical to that of the much more
frequent past participle. Morever, even without token frequencies in her data,
it seems that the original /E:/ of the past participle was on the wane already.
I therefore consider it more likely that in cases where the /E:/ is found in the
preterite singular of Class V verbs, it spread there from the past participle, and in
cases where it is found in the preterite singular of Class IV verbs, it spread there
from Class V. We have already seen that there was much interchange between
classes IV and V as early as OE.
Table 4.17: Classes IV and V Variation
Pret. Sg.
Class IV ’break’ brak, bra:k, brE:k,
brO:k, brEk
Class V ’weave’ waf, wa:f, wE:f, wO:f
118
Pret. Pl.
brE:k@n, brak
bra:k@n, brO:k@n
wE:v@n, wav,
wa:v@n, wO:v@n
Past Part.
brO:k@n
wE:v@n, wO:v@n
4.4
Dialectal Aspects
In part, we can see dialectal patterns in the behavior of the verbs. It has long
been recognized (Wyld, Long, Welna, Lass) that the tendency in the north was for
the preterite singular to spread to the preterite plural. Wyld’s terminology for a
preterite plural with the vowel of the preterite singular is the “northern preterite.”
The northern preterite is shown in Table 4.18.
Table 4.18: Northern Preterite
Class
Class
Class
Class
I
II
IV
V
Infinitive
ri:den
bind@n
brE:k@n
bidd@n
Pret Sg.
ra:d
band
bræk
bæd
Preterite Plural
ra:de
band
bræk
bæd
Past participle
riden
bund@n
brO:k@n
bEd@n
In the south, the ablaut patterns were more conservative, but there existed a
leveling tendency, found mostly in the west, to spread the past participle to the
preterite (Wyld 1927: 268-269). Wyld’s terminology for a preterite with the vowel
of the participle is the “western preterite.” The western preterite is illustrated in
Table 4.19.
Table 4.19: Western Preterite
Infinitive
Class III wring@n
Class III bi:nd@n
Class IV brE:k@n
Pret Sg.
wrung
bu:nd
brO:k
Preterite Plural
wrung
bu:nd
brO:k
Past participle
wrung@n
bu:nd@n
brO:k@n
In the case of /brO:k/, the participial vowel spread first to the preterite plural,
and then to the preterite singular, as indicated by the dates given in Welna (1996:
131).
119
By the end of ME, however, the western and the northern preterites had spread
to the south and joined the other morphological and phonological changes, such
that Long (1944: 139) reports that a single author may exhibit free variation from
among several possible vocalisms, both in quality and in quantity. Then, during
EMnE, this abundance of forms was reduced such that most verbs have only one
preterite29 . This state of affairs calls for a morphological account of what factors
favored the variants that won out.
4.5
Vowel Quantity
I argue that vowel quantity has played a critical role in the history of the strong
verbs. In the south, Open Syllable Lengthening and Homorganic Cluster Lengthening created long vowels in verb paradigms. At this point, several morphological
extensions, discussed in Section 4.3, resulted in ahistorical long vowels. In all
cases, if a verb preterite existed in competing variants with long and short vowels,
one of the long vowels won, with the exception of a few verbs ending in dentals,
for which see Chapter 5. If there was more than one long vowel, one of which was
/O:/, the /O:/ was eventually selected. If there were no long vowels anywhere in
the paradigm, one of two situations obtained: the verb tended to become weak, as
in Class IIIc verbs such as help ∼ helped, or it belonged to the very robust pattern
sing ∼ sang ∼ sung (Class IIIa).
In Class I, the long vowel, /O:/, of the preterite singular arose by phonological
rule, and the paradigm was subject to relatively little disruption compared to
other classes. Some leveling of the participle into the preterite did occur, resulting
in forms such as writ30 . Such forms with a short vowel arose only before dentals,
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and they can be explained in terms of an analogy with weak verbs, such as feed ∼
fed, that form their past tense with a short vowel before the dental. See Chapter
5 for a fuller treatment of verbs with dental-final stems.
In Class II, all principal parts had long vowels by phonological rule. In addition,
the preterite acquired two long vowels morphologically: /a:/ from the preterite
singular of classes IV and V, and /O:/ from the past participle. These three long
vowels were all sporadically shortened, possibly as a result of being in a closed
syllable in the first and third singular. The fact that the morphology resulted
exclusively in long vowels, whereas short vowels arose only by phonology, reinforces
my hypothesis that long vowels were associated with the morphology of the strong
preterite. As noted above, if the /O:/ occurred in one of the variants, that variant
won. In Class II, the result is freeze ∼ froze.
In Class IIIa, all vowels were apparently originally lengthened, but later shortened again. The robust survival of Class IIIa presents the only systematic exception to my hypothesis, an exception that can be explained by the very robustness
of this class. See Chapter 3.
In Class IIIb, the two possibilities for the preterite of bind were 1) band, representing the original preterite singular vocalism, and 2) bound, representing the
vocalism of the past participle. The version with the long vowel31 won. The variant /bO:nd/, which contained a long vowel, was too badly outnumbered by band
to survive, judging by man vs. mon in LALME. See the discussion in section 3.3.
In the other class III verbs, preterites such as song were not numerous enough to
survive, and lost out to sang.
In Class IIIc, no long vowels arose in the paradigm through any means, phonological or morphological. In the 13th and 14th century, Krygier finds a statistically
121
significant correlation between verbs ending in a liquid + consonant (LC) cluster,
and verbs that acquired weak preterites. Verbs ending in LC comprise Class IIIc
and fold, hold, salt, walk, well, wealtan of Class VII. I argue in this chapter that
the two facts are connected: the short vowels reduced the survival odds of these
verbs.
In Classes IV and V, the competing preterites were bar/spak, representing
the original preterite singular vocalism; ba:r/spa:k, with said vowel lengthened
by analogy with the other principal parts; bE:r/spE:k, which Long explains as
borrowed from the preterite plural (1944: 117); and bO:r/spO:k, from the vocalism
of the Class IV past participle. That any extension from the preterite plural should
take place is very surprising. It is invariably the least frequent of the principal
parts in all periods from OE on, and Wyld writes, “As Bülbring points out (Abl.
d. starken Zeitw., pp.116-17), the Pret. Pl. type is the least permanent of the
various forms of the Strong Verbs, and never survives in Mod. Engl. unless it be
the type also of the Past Participle” (1927: 269). His observation is supported by
the frequency data in Appendix 2. If, therefore, Long is correct in attributing the
/bE:r/ of the preterite singular to the /bE:r@n/ of the preterite plural, then the
best explanation is that the long vowel was a desideratum in the preterite singular.
Alternatively, the source of the Class IV /E:/ was the class V preterite, whither
the vowel spread from the Class V past participle. The Class IV preterite plural
may then have served to reinforce it in the Class IV preterite singular. Compare
Wyld’s observation that the extension of /fu:nd/ to the Class III preterite singular
may have been reinforced by the preterite plural, but was probably not the main
source of the vowel. Here the true account is less certain, as Class IV /E:/ comes
either from an unlikely spot within the Class IV paradigm itself, the preterite
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plural, or, more plausibly, from the Class V participle via the Class V preterite.
It is unlikely that the /E:/ comes from the Class V participle via the Class IV
participle, as Long reports only 3 Class IV participles with /E:/, out of a total of
204 Class IV participles. In either case, a long vowel has been spread analogically
to a form that had originally a short vowel.
Classes IV and V contain the only exceptional example of a morphologically
extended short vowel: brak extended from the preterite singular to the preterite
plural. I dispense with it on the following grounds: it is so infrequent as not to be
recorded in the MED, and Welna (1996: 131) gives it as a northern form, where
extension of the preterite singular to the preterite plural was the norm. In classes
IV and V, the two variants /a:/ and /O:/ outlasted the others. Shakespeare has
both bare and bore. In the end, in the standard dialect, /O:/ won.
I conclude that in the preceding sets of verbs, we can observe the following
survival patterns:
• Verbs with long vowel preterites retained their strong inflection.
Exception: -ang/-ung.
• The preterite variant with /O:/, where it existed, won out.
Exception: certain dental-final verbs.
4.6
Linguistic Motivation
In no way am I arguing that the desire to have a long vowel in the preterite
was behind the origin of each of the various dialectal levelings. It may be the
origin of some of them, but the northern preterite, exemplified in binden ∼ band
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∼ band ∼ bunden, shows a clear counterexample. I suggest that the northern
preterite represents simply a leveling of the preterite under the vocalism of the
most common form: the first and third preterite singular. In this case, where there
are no long vowels in the paradigm, frequency unhindered drives the analogy.
However, I do argue that in the case of some other dialectal levelings, vowel
quantity was one of the factors. Most important, though, vowel quantity played an
important role in the ultimate selection in EMnE from among competing forms,
regardless of their origin. As seen in the quote above from Long (1944), competing
forms often coexisted in free variation within the work of a single author. While
some competition among forms still exists today, it is more restricted and does
not include forms that were once very common, such as spake.
A priori, two possible reasons present themselves for the importance of long
vowels in the history of strong verbs. One is distributional, and the other is
functional. A distributional account would claim that due to the phonological
changes, long vowels numerically dominated short vowels in the paradigms of
strong verbs, and the remaining preterites with short vowels were made to conform
to this long vowel-strong verb pattern by acquiring long vowels or by becoming
weak. A functional account would claim that long vowels were more perceptually
salient than short vowels; therefore they carried grammatical information better,
and therefore long vowels were robustly preferred in strong preterites. These two
possibilities are examined in the next two sections.
4.6.1
Distributional Account
Lengthenings occured most prominently in the participles of classes II, IIIb, IV,
V, and VI and in the infinitives of classes IIIb, IV, V, and VI. Classes I, II, and
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VI had already long vowels in the preterite singular. These changes created the
distribution of long vowels seen in Table 4.20.
Table 4.20: EME Distribution of Long Vowels
Class
I
II
IIIa
IIIb
IIIc
IV
V
VI
infinitive preterite singular
L
L
L
L
L
L
preterite plural
L/S
(L)
L
L
past participle
L/S
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
L
There are two ways of conceiving of the distributional relationship between
long vowels and strong verb preterites. A preterite could have faced pressure to
conform to other preterites, resulting in inter-paradigmatic analogy, following the
arrangement of Table 4.20. There could also have been pressure to conform with
other members of an individual verb’s paradigm, resulting in intra-paradigmatic
analogy.
At the time when long vowels were arising morphologically in strong principal
parts, the creation of some of the variants was possibly driven by the particular
desire to have a long vowel in the preterite. This motivation is especially probable
if brE:k was formed on the basis of the preterite plural, because it provides a reason
why the preterite plural, which was otherwise in the process of dying out, acted as
the source for analogy in the much more frequent preterite singular. If brE:k was
formed instead on the basis of the Class V preterite, itself formed on the basis of
the Class V participle, the motivation may or may not have been the preference
for a long vowel. Many complex reasons underlie the ablaut flux in strong verbs.
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In any case, other candidates for extensions motivated by the preference for a long
vowel exist in ba:r and fu:nd. At the time when such forms were being created,
long vowels were found in the preterite singulars of only Class I, II, and VI verbs,
and possibly of Class IIIa verbs ending in /ng/. Using Krygier (1994: 255-267), I
count 300 ME strong verbs, of which 171, or 57%, had long vowels in the preterite
singulars. A one-sample proportion z-test confirms that long vowels outnumber
short vowels with a p-value of .0078, but 57% is hardly an overwhelming majority.
It appears unlikely that the long vowels dominated the short vowels in preterites to
such an extent as to drive out short vowel preterites in ME and make them weak.
In other words, I do not believe there is evidence that inter-paradigmatic analogy
was operative in eliminating the strong preterites of Class III verbs ending in LC.
In section 6.2, I provide an account relying on perceptual salience to explain why
these forms with short vowels before LC clusters made poor strong preterites.
Intra-paradigmatic analogy, in contrast, was able to play a role at all periods
after the phonological lengthenings. With the exception of verbs ending in clusters
that did not permit long vowels, all verb classes had long vowels in at least three
principal parts, including the infinitive/present, which served as the base. On
the one hand, the method of conveying grammatical distinctions by means of
ablaut requires some differences to exist between the vowels of the present and
the preterite32 . On the other hand, the principle of paradigm uniformity favors
similarity between members of a paradigm. The lengthening of vowels in strong
verb preterites resembles a phenomenon in Swiss German presented by Kiparsky
(1982). In the Kesswil dialect of Swiss German, the difference between the singular
and plural of certain nouns was originally signaled by a difference in both the
backness and the height of the vowels. Paradigm leveling applied such that the
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difference was still signaled, but now only by the backness. Table 4.21 shows the
vowel alternations in the paradigm before and after the leveling took place.
Table 4.21: Swiss German Leveling, Kesswil Dialect
Before leveling
After leveling
Singular
bOd@
bOd@
Plural
böd@
bÖd@
A similar drive to make the vowels of the preterite and present similar, but not
identical, may have been at work in, e.g., lengthening the vowel of ba:r. Compare
Table 4.22. This phenomenon is the opposite of that found in the past-tense
marking of verbs such as bleed ∼ bled, prior to the Great Vowel Shift. The quality
of the present and preterite vowels of bleed and bled were originally the same, and
the quantity was changed in the preterite. The prevalence of this type of pasttense marking led to a productive pattern whereby the past tense was created
by making the vowel of the preterite differ from that of the present in quantity,
and remain the same in quality. This applies only to verbs ending in dentals and
is discussed in further detail in Chapter 5. In the case of bra:k, the method of
past-tense marking is to make the vowel of the preterite differ from that of the
present in quality, and remain the same in quantity.
Table 4.22: Middle English Leveling
Before leveling
After leveling
Present Preterite
brE:k@
brak
brE:k@
bra:k
I argue that inter-paradigmatic analogy was at work in the selection of the
variant with /O:/. In Classes I, II, IV, and V this vowel arose through two separate
phonological changes: the unconditioned shift of OE /a:/ to ME /O:/ in the Class
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I preterite singular, and the open-syllable lengthening of /o/ in the participle of
classes II, IV, and V. When the participial /O:/ was spread to the preterites of
these latter classes, /O:/ was found in the preterites of 28 of 101 verbs examined by
Long. It became an effective marker of past tense. Neither of the other two long
vowels that were possible in Class IV and V preterites, namely /E:/ and /a:/, had
so broad a distribution as /O:/. The former was not found in Class I preterites, and
it would have led to homophonous presents and preterites in verbs without final
dentals. The latter was found neither in Class I or II, except where extended on
occasion by analogy with Class IV and V verbs. Selecting the variant with /O:/ in
many verbs created a set of preterites with high type frequency, which reinforced
their salience as strong verbs.
According to Krygier (1994: 248-49), LC verbs were statistically favored to
acquire weak past tenses in the 13th and 14th centuries, based on the following
figures. 18 out of 30 LC strong verbs, or 60%, exhibited weak past tenses in the
13th century, compared to 81 out of 223 strong verbs of all other types, or 36%.
In the 14th century, 27 of 28 LC strong verbs, or 96%, exhibited weak past tenses,
compared to 132 out of 202, or 65%, of all other strong verbs. Chi-square tests
show that the proportion of LC strong verbs with weak past tenses is statistically
significant at the 90% confidence level.
If my hypothesis is correct, and the lack of robustness of their strong inflection
has less to do with vowel length, then this early date means a distributional account
of LC weakening can be excluded. In the 13th century, most of the phonological
lengthenings had only recently applied or were still ongoing, and the morphological
lengthenings were only beginning to apply. Inter-paradigmatic pressure on verbs
to have a long vowel in the strong preterite or become weak is not likely to have
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been the driving factor, given that the proportion of preterites with long vowels
is only 57%, hardly enough to drive out the 43% with short vowels. The LC
verbs lead to the next section, a functional account of vowel length in strong verb
preterites.
4.6.2
Functional Account
The nature of strong verbs is to convey tense through a change in the stem vowel. It
is in the interest of the listener, therefore, to be able to perceive well the difference
between the vowel of the present tense and the vowel of the past tense. Research
by Löfstedt (2010), Flemming (2004), and Steriade (2001) indicates there may exist contrasts between phonemes that are sufficient to convey lexical information,
i.e. to create minimal pairs, but insufficient to convey grammatical information.
For example, in Swedish, the non-neuter definite article, affixed to the noun, has
two allomorphs, [en] and [n]. Löfstedt argues that there are instances in which the
allomorph is selected according to its perceptual salience, rather than simply by
phonotactics. For instance, the definite form of [søm:] ‘seam’ is [søm:en] rather
than *[søm:n], even though [søm:n] is a phonotactically well-formed word in the
language, meaning ‘sleep’. Therefore, phonotactics is not what is at work here.
Neither is it mere sporadic avoidance of homophony, as the [en] allomorph surfaces systematically for all words ending in nasals, even those without potentially
homophonous words elsewhere in the lexicon. In other words, the contrast [m] ∼
[m:n] is sufficient to make a lexical contrast between the nouns [søm:] ‘seam’ and
[søm:n] ‘sleep’, but not perceptually salient enough to meet the higher standards
for making grammatical contrast between the indefinite [søm:] ‘seam’ and definite
[søm:n] ‘the seam’.
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A similar phenomenon, wherein two vowels were sufficiently distinguishable to
contrast lexical items but not sufficient to contrast different tenses of the same
verb, may account for the tendency of verbs ending in liquid + consonant clusters
to acquire weak preterites. The 13th century verbs that Krygier bases his conclusion on are the following: belZen ‘get angry’, berZen ‘defend’, bernen ‘burn’, bersten
‘burst’, delven ‘delve’, derven ‘labor’, ernen ‘run’, Zelden ‘yield’, helpen ‘help’,
melken ‘milk’, murnen ‘mourn’, salten ‘salt’, spurnen ‘spurn’, swelZen ‘seam’, swelten ‘die’, walken ‘walk’, wherven ‘turn’, wurthen ‘become’. Of these 18 verbs, only
1 contains a cluster that triggers lengthening: Zelden. In the others, the vowel
of the past tense is likely to have been of short duration, even relative to short
vowels in other environments.
There is evidence from phonetic studies showing that in most cases, the greater
the number of tautosyllabic consonants in a syllable coda, the shorter the vowel is
(Bell 1849, Elert 1964, Peterson and Lehiste 1960, Lindblom, Lyberg, and Holmgren 1981, Munhall et al. 1992). It is often assumed that the vowel is produced
in an abbreviated fashion in order to keep the length of the syllables in e.g. car
and carve roughly similar. Munhall et al. (1992) conducted a study to test this
hypothesis. They compared the production of /E/ and /æ/ before complex codas
and singletons. Because /æ/ is a low vowel, it involves greater jaw movement than
/E/, so they tested whether the jaw opening was decreased before a complex coda
relative to the aperture before a singleton. They found no difference, and they
concluded that the shortening before consonant clusters is perceptual only, and
the production remains the same. The perceptual shortening results from greater
coarticulation between the end of the vowel and the beginning of the coda. The
/r/ in carve is begun sooner than the /r/ of car. The gestural overlap of vowel and
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coda consonant is what leads listeners to perceive the vowel as shorter in carve.
In addition to an abundance of phonetic evidence from PDE for perceptual
shortening of vowels before complex codas, we have indirect evidence for this
phenomenon from earlier periods of English as well. Consider the ME rule of
pre-cluster shortening, number [2] in section 4.2, which shows that shortening was
present specifically in English. The exceptions to such shortening are obviously the
specific clusters that combined with specific vowels to trigger what is traditionally
called Homorganic Cluster Lengthening. In these 17 preterites—barn, barst, dalf,
darf, arn, halp, malk, marn, salt, sparn, swalt, walk, wharf, and warth—however,
the coda clusters are such that do not in Modern English permit, and perhaps never
in the history of English have permitted, contrastive vowel length. (Stockwell and
Minkova 1992: 198).
Similarly, thanks to the rules of pre-cluster shortening and of open-syllable
lengthening, we know that the vowel of the present and infinitive of LC-final
verbs was shorter than the vowel of verbs in open syllables: hElpen vs. bE:ren.
Hence, even though there was a phonemic difference between the vowels of 1st
person sg. present tense /hElp(@)/ and of 1st person sg. preterite /halp/, the
phonetic difference would have been much slighter than the phonetic differences of
/bE:r(@)/ and of /bar/. It is impossible to carry out phonetic lab measurements on
ME speakers, but we know that both vowels /E/ and /a/ were front, and one was
low and one low mid. We know that speakers would have had very little time, due
to the short duration of the vowel in the environment before a cluster, to perceive
the difference between the two. The past-tenseness of /halp/ would therefore have
been signaled much less robustly than that of any other strong verb.
ME /E/ and /a/ present a case similar to Löfstedt’s (2010) findings in Swedish.
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Here the two vowels were sufficiently distinct to carry lexical information, but
the limited perceptual length before complex codas rendered them too similar to
carry grammatical information. In other environments, they were able to carry
grammatical information.
Because the preterite /halp/ so strongly resembled the present /hElp(@)/, it
had the potential to be misinterpreted by listeners as a weak preterite33 . Under
the very conditions where /E/ sounded most like /a/, e.g. in fast speech or speech
with background noise, a dental suffix would be the most difficult to perceive. A
listener who heard /halp/ but perceived the vowel as /E/, might well interpret
the form as /hElpt/, with the assumption that the dental, which had never in fact
been pronounced, had been lost in transmission. The third consonant in the coda
would be subject to gestural overlap with the preceding consonants, and would
not be easily discernible under less than optimal conditions. If learners interpreted
the underlying form as /hElpt/, they would begin to produce it themselves. This
reanalysis would be aided by the fact that in ME, most strong verbs did have
both strong and weak preterites. In some cases, the weak forms did not catch on,
but in cases where the strong preterite could be interpreted as weak, the weak
preterites would be more likely to catch on in higher frequency verbs, than in
cases where the two variants were more distinct. By implication, short vowels
in verbs such as sing ∼ sang ∼ sung would also have contributed to a decreased
salience of strong preterites. There, the decreased salience was compensated for
by close resemblance to many other such strong verbs. This class of verbs was
robust enough in type frequency and phonological similarity that it was not in
danger of suffering the same fate as help and the other verb ending in LC clusters.
Furthermore, beginning in the 15th century, a phonological change occurred
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that shifted /Er/ to /ar/. At this point, for 6 of these 17 verbs, namely berZen,
bernen, bersten derven, ernen, and wherven, there would have been no difference
whatsoever between the stem of the present and of the past. One must concede
that English does permit inflections of this sort, as in cut ∼ cut. However, the
only verbs that are invariant between the present and past are those that end in
dentals, and they represent a different phenomenon: the fact that a final dental
marks past tense, even if it is also the dental of the stem and is found in the
present tense. This phenomenon is explored in greater detail in Chapter 5. Any
remaining strong forms of these verbs, then, were even more likely than before to
be interpreted as weak.
4.7
Conclusion
ME lengthenings and shortenings of vowels paved the way for a substantial increase of the morphological disruption to the ablaut system that had begun in
OE. The quantity changes created an imbalance within verbal paradigms, where
the preterite was often the only member with a short vowel. Where possible, this
situation was repaired by analogy, either by the lengthening of the vowel native
to the preterite, or by the extension of a long vowel, different in quality from the
preterite, from elsewhere in the paradigm. Where no long vowel existed in the
paradigm, as in verbs ending in –LC clusters, no repair due to paradigm leveling
was necessary, because all members had short vowels, nor was lengthening even
possible in that pre-cluster environment. However, in these verbs, the vowel was
phonetically even shorter than short vowels in other verbs, due to the tautosyllabic cluster in the coda. The duration of the vowel was insufficient for speakers
133
to hear clearly the quality of the vowel, and strong preterites had the potential
of being misperceived as weak. Hence, verbs ending in –LC clusters were especially prone to becoming weak, beginning in the 13th and 14th centuries. Of the
LC-final verbs, not one survives in the standard dialect as strong, although the
highly frequent help retains some strong forms in other dialects, especially holp
and holpen.
At the end of ME, these phonological and morphological changes had resulted in a situation where most verbs exhibited a whole host of vocalisms in
their paradigms. This state of free variation was reduced significantly in EMnE,
and I consider it no accident that the dominant variants contained long vowels. Long vowels were preferred both for distributional—intra-paradigmatic and
inter-paradigmatic—reasons, and for perceptual reasons. Eventually, what free
variation still remained in the latter part of EME, such as bare/bore, was everywhere reduced in favor of /O:/, because of the great variety of verb classes that
ended up with this vowel somewhere in their paradigm: classes I, II, IV, and V.
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Chapter 5
Dental Stems
5.1
Introduction
The classification of Present Day English (PDE) verbs is, as discussed in the
introductory chapter, fraught with complexity. Verbs such as run ∼ ran are clearly
strong, while verbs such as walk ∼ walked are clearly weak. Verbs that both change
the vowel and add a suffix, such as keep ∼ kept, or that do neither, such as shut
∼ shut, are harder to classify. The present chapter deals with irregular verbs that
end in dental stops, primarily the development of verbs such as shut ∼ shut. Keep
∼ kept, meet ∼ met, and shut ∼ shut all arose through the addition of the dental
preterite suffix. Long vowels shortened before the cluster of the preterite, resulting
in the vowel difference between present and preterite in keep and meet. In Middle
English (ME) the final vowel of the preterite suffix was lost, and because English
does not tolerate final geminates, the verbs with dental-final stems retain no trace
of the preterite suffix. These steps are summarized in Table 5.1.
The reason for focusing the present chapter on class (c) is that they introduced
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Table 5.1: Dental-Final Developments
Infin.
(a) ke:pan
ke:pan
Vowel
shortening
Final
ke:p
syllable loss
Degemination ke:p
Pret.
ke:pte
kepte
Infin.
(b) me:tan
me:tan
Pret.
me:tte
mette
Infin.
(c) Suttan
Suttan
Pret.
Sutte
Sutte
kept
me:t
mett
Sutt
Sutt
kept
me:t
met
Sut
Sut
a new means of marking the past tense, namely the zero allomorph. The vowel
changes of (a) and (b), though not original to these verbs, was always present as
a means of marking past tense in English.
The chapter begins with a study of the development of the two competing
mechanisms for marking a weak past tense: the variant with a “buffer” vowel
between the dental of the stem and the dental of the preterite, and the variant
without a buffer vowel. The latter changed in form from an overt suffix -te/-de to
a zero allomorph, but as a class it remains distinct from the walk ∼ walked type.
The question section 5.2 seeks to explain are twofold. First, the default preterite
suffix for dental-final verbs in Old English (OE) had no buffer vowel. The default
preterite suffix in PDE for such verbs, such as threaded, lauded, started, etc., has
a buffer vowel. What caused this change? Second, what accounts for the specific
verbs in PDE that irregularly mark their past tense with the zero allomorph?
Section 5.3 treats the most productive classes of dental-final strong verbs: those
like meet ∼ met that form their past tense by shortening the vowel of the present,
and those that form their past tense with the vowel /æ/, as in spit ∼ spat. The
final section deals with the origin of the widespread ME weakening of strong verbs,
136
and how dental-final verbs, a sort of intermediate class by their very nature, may
have played a role.
5.2
5.2.1
Dental-Final Weak Verbs
Proto-Germanic and Old English
Proto-Germanic contained two weak preterite suffixes that are relevant to the
development of the dental-final weak verbs. The first was -ede, traditionally classified as Class 1, and the second -ōde, traditionally classified as Class 2. Prior to
OE, these two suffixes underwent vowel reduction. The long /-o:-/ of Class 2 was
shortened. The short /-e-/ of Class 1 was syncopated in various environments,
including following a dental suffix. Following syncopation, the dental stop of the
suffix assimilated in voicing to the dental stop of the stem. Subsequent to the
vowel reduction, weak suffixes appeared with two shapes: those with a vowel between the stem and the dental of the suffix, the “buffer” vowel, and the syncopated
forms without such a buffer vowel. In Late Old English and Early Middle English
(EME), further vowel reduction applied, such that the unstressed vowels of the
suffixes began to be pronounced less distinctly, as indicated by the confusion in
spelling. The outcome of this vowel reduction is represented as a schwa in Table
5.2.
Table 5.3 shows the distribution of the two preterite suffix forms for verbs ending in dentals. The figures were gathered by searching the York-Toronto-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose for the orthographic sequences <dde>, <tte>,
<d/tede>, <d/tode>, and <d/tade>34 . Because the corpus uses <+d> and
<+t> to represent the eth and thorn characters, words where the initial <d> or
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Table 5.2: Weak Preterites
PGmc
Early OE
V Reduction
Late OE
V Reduction
Class 1
non-dental
*swerede
‘swore’
swerede
Class 1
dental
*hredede
‘saved’
hredde
Class 2
non-dental
*lufōde
‘loved’
lufode
Class 2
dental
*bodōde
‘announced’
bodode
swer@d@
hredd@
luf@d@
bod@d@
<t> in the search string was preceded by <+> were removed from the lists. The
figures for <dde> and <tte> were summed and placed in column 2, and the other
six figures, representing preterites with a buffer vowel between the dentals, were
summed and placed in column 3. This purely mechanical search by orthographical
strings is not able to distinguish between sende, the past tense of sendan ‘send’,
and lǣnde, the past tense of lǣnan35 ‘lend’. The form sende arises from *sendde, the syncopated form of *send-ede. Degemination applies after a consonant,
geminates not being permitted in that environment. As a result, all preterites belonging to verbs ending in a consonant plus a dental are omitted from this search.
It is therefore the case that the number of preterite allomorphs without the buffer
vowel is somewhat higher than the number given in Table 5.3.
Table 5.3: OE Preterite Allomorph Distribution
Token frequency
Percentage
<-te>/<-de>
(no buffer vowel)
2425
78%
<-tVde>/<-dVde>
(buffer vowel)
669
22%
Given that the actual number of preterites in the corpus without the buffer
138
vowel is higher than 2425, something like 80% or even more of the verbs ending
in dentals take the allomorph without a buffer vowel. This situation is in sharp
contrast to PDE, where preterites such as knitted and threaded are the default.
This chapter traces the development of the preterite allomorphy of the dentalfinal weak verbs.
5.2.2
Origins of Syncope
First, it is necessary to ask why syncope took place after dental-final stems, when
its usual environment was after a heavy stem. Wright (1954: 276-277) says merely
that analogy with the heavy stems was responsible, without specifying further.
Minkova’s account describes the effects in Late Old English of the syncope that
took place in pre-Old English—the effect being the reanalysis of the boundary
between stem and suffix—but not the causes of the pre-Old English syncope.
Following the reanalysis, there is no syncope synchronically: the underlying form
of the Late Old English preterite suffix is /de/.
Syncope of the weak preterite vowel took place in several environments (Welna
1996: 52-59), and some of them are more difficult to explain than others. What
concerns us here is the syncope after a dental-final stem, and that is simple to
explain. There is ample evidence that the sequence TVTV, where T is a dental
stop and V is a vowel, is dispreferred in languages.
Menn and MacWhinney (1984) cite a plethora of examples in which a word,
built according to the regular morphology of a language, would duplicate or give
the appearance of duplicating an affix, and the word is therefore not produced.
Speakers employ a variety of strategies in order to keep from producing such words.
For instance, English speakers use haplology—the non-addition or deletion of an
139
affix—in the plural series instead of serieses*, and an avoidance strategy in the
case of friendlily*. German speakers employ suppletion in choosing to add a
diminutive -chen instead of -lein to words that end in /l/. Furthermore, children
are later in producing such forms as pasted and kisses, which give the appearance
of affix duplication, than in producing forms that do not give the appearance
of affix duplication (Berko 1958; Bybee and Slobin 1982). Both morphological
and phonological reasons have been proposed for why it is dispreferred, and the
underlying factors are less easy to explain.
Phonologically, the sequence TVTV has been interpreted as a violation of
what is called the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). The OCP is a prosodic
constraint that disprefers identical adjacent elements of any sort, whether syllables,
tones, phonemes, or the like. Developed first by Leben (1973) to explain the
avoidance of identical adjacent tones, it was extended by McCarthy (1986) to
include such phenomena as the avoidance of C1 VC1 VC2 sequences in Semitic.
Since then, much work has been done on developing the OCP, which is a universal
yet violable constraint.
Menn and MacWhinney (1984) take a morphological approach to the reluctance to produce such forms as friendlily*. Because the reluctance indubitably
exists, yet is so frequently violated, Menn and MacWhinney refer to it as a weak
universal. They assign it the name “repeated morph constraint” and give the
formal definition that follows (529):
“*XY, where X and Y are adjacent surface strings such that both could be interpreted as manifesting the same underlying morpheme through regular phonological
rules, and where either
(a) X and Y are both affixes, or
140
(b) either X or Y is an affix, and the other is a (proper subpart of a) stem.”
Furthermore, while languages often avoid repetition of a morpheme36 , they
also often deliberately generate repetition, in the process known as reduplication.
For example, Ancient Greek verbs form their perfect by reduplication, e.g. present
stem /lu:/ ‘loose’, perfect stem /lelu:/ ‘have loosed’. Yet in the very same language, /apoina/ ‘ransom’ is the result of haplologizing /apo + poina/ ‘from’ +
‘recompense’ (Liddell, Scott, and Jones s.v. apoina). Menn and MacWhinney conclude that the universal tendency is to avoid specifically accidental duplication,
but not to interfere with deliberate reduplication as a grammatical marker.
In the traditional classification of OE verbs into Class I and Class II verbs,
it is Class I verbs that undergo syncope, while Class II verbs continue to violate the OCP and Repeated Morph Constraint. In pre-Old English, the syncope
pattern can be explained by vowel quantity. The Class II preterite suffix *-ōd(Wright 1954: 277) would not have been subject to syncope, if we order syncope
chronologically before shortening of unstressed vowels, both of which took place
in prehistoric OE. The Class I preterite suffix *-id- always had a short vowel, and
was therefore subject to syncope. After syncope ceased to be an active process,
and after the environments were obscured, the unsyncopated vowel of Class II, in
Minkova’s analysis, became reinterpreted as part of the stem.
5.2.3
M1 (1150-1250)
The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English is divided into four periods,
labeled M1, M2, M3, and M4. M1 covers the dates from approximately 1150 to
1250. During this period, various phonological changes applied that changed how
the verbal system looked. The changes began with pre-cluster shortening of a
141
long vowel. Pre-cluster shortening affected verbs with long vowels in the stem and
syncopated preterite suffixes, where the final consonant of the stem combined with
the dental stop of the preterite suffix to create a cluster that triggered shortening.
The result was the creation of vowel alternation–properly the marker of a strong
verb–in originally weak verbs. The subsequent changes were the loss of gemination
and final unstressed vowels. The result was that dental-final weak verbs with long
vowels and syncopated suffixes had only a vowel change, with no overt suffix, to
mark the past tense, and dental-final weak verbs with short vowels and syncopated
suffixes had no difference between the present and past tense, except for personal
inflectional endings.
When a verb was borrowed, e.g. from French, or created from a noun or
adjective, it became necessary to create a preterite. The preterite system that
speakers had access to when generating a new preterite is shown in Table 5.4.
Table 5.4: Dental-Final Developments
Earliest ME
me:tte
‘met’
mette
Pre-cluster
shortening
Apocope
mett
Degemination met
shutte ke:pte bodede
‘shut’ ‘kept’ ‘announced’
shutte kepte bodede
swerede
‘swore’
swerede
shutt
shut
swered
swered
kept
kept
boded
boded
An innovative dental-final weak verb had the option either of taking the default weak preterite suffix, or the more specific default dental-final weak preterite
suffix. In the OE and earliest ME overall verbal system, the syncopated suffix
occurred only in certain environments, and only on Class 1 verbs, while the unsyncopated suffix occurred on all Class 2 verbs and many Class 1 verbs. Within
the set of dental-final verbs, in contrast, the syncopated suffix was the default.
142
The figures for the M1 suffixes occurring on dental-final verbs, taken from the
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, are shown in Table 5.5. I omit
wend(e)/went(e) from consideration, because it accounts for nearly half the tokens
of the verbs. Bybee (2001: 124-26) provides evidence that highly frequent forms
tend to become isolated from other members of their families and to have limited
impact on productive patterns. In this particular case, wend(e)/went(e) was so
frequent that the preterite became dissociated even from the present wendan and
associated instead with gangan. It is unlikely to have played any significant role
in the overall system of dental suffix allomorphy.
Table 5.5: M1 Preterite Allomorph Distribution
Token frequency
Percentage
<-te>/<-de>
(no buffer vowel)
287
88%
<-tVde>/<-dVde>
(buffer vowel)
39
12%
The syncopated preterite allomorph continued its numerical dominance among
dental-final verbs in the earliest stage of ME. In addition to tracking the history
of the ratio between the two allomorphs, I also wish to determine which of the
two was more productive. I operate on the assumption that speakers attempt to
reproduce the exemplars stored in their head to the best of their ability. If they
have memories of having heard the past tense of, e.g. write as wrote, they will
produce wrote37 . If they have no memories of having heard the past tense of, say,
slit, they will apply some productive pattern to it. Table 5.5 shows that the M1
balance of the allomorphs is in favor of the one without the buffer vowel, but it
does not guarantee that speakers will always generate that one, or even that they
will generate it something like 88% of the time. It is possible that every one of
143
those has been lexicalized, and when called upon to produce a preterite they’ve
never heard, speakers will not use it. However, in the case of the M1 period, the
dominance is sufficient that I find this highly unlikely, and I see no reason to reject
the null hypothesis that the relative productivity has not changed since Late Old
English. I therefore begin with the prediction that the allomorph without the
buffer vowel will be the more productively used of the two.
There are two reasons to include a study of productivity in the M1 period.
One is simply to have the data to compare with later periods, to see if any significant change takes place. The other is that the methodology for determining
productivity is shaky. If, in the case where a strong prediction can be made a
priori, the results end up not supporting the hypothesis, it may be grounds for
questioning the methodology rather than the hypothesis. The challenges of the
methodology are manifold: the usual caveats about the representativeness of corpora for the spoken language, the fact that this particular period of English is
poorly attested, and the extent to which the orthography is a reliable indicator of
the pronunciation. In other weak verbs, there are cases where the preterite morpheme is spelled <ede>, but it scans as disyllabic. In that case, it is impossible to
determine directly which vowel is omitted. Spellings such as <answerde> indicate
that at least sometimes the buffer vowel is the one deleted in ME. These facts lead
to the risk that a <dede> spelling in fact represents /(d)de/. Fortunately, the
fact that affixes are more likely to have material deleted than stems means that
a pronunciation of /(d)de/ for <dede> is less probable than /ded/, but it is still
possible to adduce some indirect evidence relevant to the specific phenomenon of
English vowel deletion.
From nouns, it is possible to establish that the process of apocope was com-
144
pleted both earlier and more completely than the process of syncope. Syncope
failed to apply regularly when the result would have been phonotactically illegal,
as in fishes (fishs*). In the case of verbs not ending in dentals, the spellings of
EMnE, preserved in PDE, indicate that even if <answerde> reflected a possible
pronunciation, <answered> was the regular outcome. Disyllabic EMnE forms
such plungèd38 exist, but forms such as plungde, or even the more phonotactically
plausible learnde, do not. It follows that when <ede> is scanned monosyllabically,
it is more likely to represent /ed/ than /de/. Finally, a high degree of consistency
between ME orthography and PDE pronunciation in this one respect can be seen,
in that dental-final verbs are virtually always spelled with a buffer vowel in ME,
and in all the periods for which we have direct evidence for pronunciation, beginning with the grammarians’ commentary, are pronounced with a buffer vowel.
Given the accumulation of evidence, I treat <ed(e)> as representing a suffix with
a buffer vowel, while allowing that in some undeterminable but low number of
cases it may in fact represent a suffix without a buffer vowel. As for the reverse
scenario, there is no evidence anywhere in the language that a buffer vowel, when
pronounced, would not be represented in the orthography. Hence, <de> can safely
be taken to represent /de/ rather than /ede/.
In the absence of controlled experiments on nonce words performed on native speakers, productivity is determined by the preterite assigned to the following classes of words: newly created denominal verbs, originally strong verbs
made weak, loanwords, verbs inadequately attested in OE, and weak verbs with a
preterite suffix that is not the expected reflex of their OE suffix. As an example
of the last, the preterite of nēodian in OE was nēodede. The M1 preterite nett is
considered a productive use of the suffix without a buffer vowel. Table 5.6 shows
145
the types and tokens of productive use of each of the two suffixes.
Table 5.6: Productive allomorphy in M1
#
%
#
%
types
types
tokens
tokens
<-t(e)>/<-d(e)>
(no buffer vowel)
181
64%
75
79%
<-tVd(e)>/
(buffer vowel)
102
36%
20
21%
A one-sample proportion z-test gives a p-value of less than .001 for the hypothesis that the preterite suffix without a buffer vowel was the preferred allomorph,
which is in accord with the expected prediction. Later in the chapter the different
treatment of French loanwords with respect to other verbs becomes important,
so it will be instructive here to note the behavior of the French loanwords. The
number of French loans recorded in the Penn-Helsinki Corpus for the M1 period
is small. Only three types occur in the list of dental-final verb preterites: accord,
wait, and rest. Accord and wait have buffer vowels in the preterite, and rest none:
<reste> (2x).
Between OE and M1, there is a drastic change in the number of syllables
of verb stems. Comparing the preterites of dental-final weak verbs gathered from
the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose to the preterites of
dental-final weak verbs gathered from the M1 period of the Penn-Helsinki Parsed
Corpus of Middle English, I find a majority of the verb stems in OE to be di- or
polysyllabic, and a majority of their descendants in the M1 period to be monosyllabic. I refer only to M1 verbs inherited directly from OE, for the purpose of
determining whether the native grammar has changed or not. The ratios of the
token frequencies are shown in Table 5.7.
146
Table 5.7: Syllable Count in Verb Stems
#
%
#
%
monosyllabic
monosyllabic
di- or polysyllabic
di- or polysyllabic
Old English
1375
45%
1709
55%
M1
282
94%
18
6%
In OE, prefixes such as a-, be-, ge-, for-, and others were employed for altering
the semantics of verbs. Bærnan meant to burn or set on fire, and forbærnan meant
to burn utterly or consume with fire. This system of verbal prefixation began to
be replaced by a system of phrasal verbs such as “burn up” (Hiltunen 1983). The
causes are debated, and do not concern us here, but the effect is that most native
verbs become monosyllabic, with prefixed forms such as “upset” surviving only
when lexicalized, and not as the result of a productive system of prefixation.
To summarize the findings from the M1 period, the preterite allomorph without
a buffer vowel continues to dominate in verbs ending in dentals. Both allomorphs
are extended in the generation of new forms, but the variant without a buffer vowel
dominates in this as well. The major change has been that native verbs are now
predominantly monosyllabic. French loanwords are attested in small numbers.
5.2.4
M2 (1250-1350)
The period M2 of the Penn-Helsinki Corpus covers the dates from approximately
1250 to 1350. The most salient fact about the M2 period is the influx of French
loanwords. A search for preterites of verbs ending in dentals yields accord, amend,
arrest, comfort, confound, defend, delight, depart, dispute, distinct, haste, mount,
147
part, record, rest, tempt, torment, and visit. These verbs account for 18 of the
48 overall types, and 55 of the 310 tokens. Old French loanwords represent a
significantly larger portion of the vocabulary in the M2 period than in the M1
period. A two-sample proportion z-test on the relative token proportions in Table
5.8 gives a p-value of less than .001.
Table 5.8: Old French Dental-Final Verbs
M1
OF types, % of total 11%
OF tokens, % of total 3.00%
OF tokens, #
9
# tokens total
322
M2
38%
18%
55
310
The Old French loanwords can be characterized as predominantly disyllabic, in
contrast to the native words, of which only a single token in the list of preterites,
<vp-braided>, has a stem of more than one syllable. The Old French loanwords,
without exception, are assigned the preterite allomorph spelled with a buffer vowel.
As stated above, we cannot guarantee that the buffer vowel was pronounced in
all cases. However, the consistency of the orthography in representing the vowel
in loanwords, in addition to the distribution of PDE, in which only two French
loanwords, namely quit and cost, have a no-change preterite, makes it more than
likely that the vowel was pronounced in all or nearly all cases in which it was
spelled. Compare the Old French preference for the allomorph with a buffer vowel
to the existing pattern in native words, shown in Table 5.9.
In the M2 period, Old French verbs are assigned the default preterite allomorph
for the overall verbal system, the suffix with the buffer vowel, not the default suffix
for the specifically dental-final verbs. They are not sensitive to the phonological
pattern among native words wherein verbs ending in dentals receive the allomorph
148
Table 5.9: Old French Dental-Final Verbs
OF # tokens
Native # tokens
OF % tokens
Native % tokens
-t(e)/-d(e) (no
buffer vowel)
0
198
0%
80%
-tVd(e)/-dVd(e)
(buffer vowel)
55
51
100%
20%
without a buffer vowel. This is so despite the fact that the allomorph without
a buffer vowel continues to enjoy some productivity among native words. For
example, wed, which had the preterite weddede in OE and M1, appears as <uedde>
in M2. In section 5.2.3 it was argued that <dde> never represents /ded(e)/; hence
we take <uedde> to represent a syncopated form, the pre-form of PDE preterite
wed.
There exist parallels for this separate treatment of loanwords, e.g. Hebrew
noun plurals (Becker 2009). Hebrew masculine nouns take the plural –im and
feminine nouns the plural –ot. However, native masculine nouns that have /o/
in their final syllable are permitted to take the plural –ot. This is a productive
pattern and is applied to nonce words in experiments. Loanwords, however, are
not sensitive to this phonologically-based allomorphy. All masculine loanwords
are assigned the plural –im regardless of their stem vowels. Becker attributes this
dual treatment of native and loanwords to differences in stress.
In the case of Old French loanwords, I submit that they are phonotactically
different from native verbs in being predominantly disyllabic. They stand out
as loanwords, and are thus not subject to all the same fine morphophonological
distinctions as native words are. The foreign-sounding loanwords are shunted
149
overwhelmingly into a default category: the preterite allomorph with a buffer
vowel.
As in M1, we may wonder about the relative productivity of the two allomorphs
in M2. This, in some ways, is even more difficult to measure. In M1, productivity
was measured by counting forms that had suffixes that they did not have in OE.
Limiting the count to words that appear in M2 with suffixes they did not have
in OE or M1 leaves an extremely small data set, and that procedure is probably
not reflective of true productivity. Consider a word such as fast. It had no buffer
vowel in OE, and a buffer vowel in M1 and M2. The form fasted in M1 is certainly
innovative, but what about M2? Perhaps speakers who produced fasted in M2
produced it because this was the form stored in their memory, which had been
passed down from generation to generation since M1. Or perhaps it was infrequent,
and they were generating a new preterite because their memory contained no
exemplars of an existing preterite for fast, or perhaps it contained both faste and
fasted. This is the same problem that we face when we take the PDE preterite of an
infrequent verb, such as slung, to be conservative in its morphology because sling
was an OE strong verb of Class III. Sling happens to have been a very infrequent
verb, with no instances of slungon or slungen attested in the OE corpus. It survived
largely because when speakers were called upon to generate a past tense for it,
not having heard one recently, they had Class III as a productive pattern to fit
it to. Had it both been infrequent and belonged to a rare pattern, its original
inflection would not likely have survived. Likewise, infrequent verbs, or verbs for
which competition existed, such as put ∼ put and put ∼ putted, partly retained
their inherited past tenses, and partly had new past tenses generated, which might
or might not match their inherited past tenses. It is with great caution, then, that
150
I compute productivity for M2 just as in M1, disregarding the fact that some M2
forms might have been simply inherited from M1. Table 5.2.4 shows the results.
Note that these include only OE and Old Norse—because Old Norse phonotactics
were similar to OE—verbs. A one-sample proportion test for the difference in
token proportions gives a p-value of .03 for the hypothesis that the proportion
of forms with a buffer vowel is significantly greater than the proportion of forms
without a buffer vowel.
Table 5.10: Productive allomorphy in M2
#
%
#
%
types
types
tokens
tokens
-t(e)/-d(e) (no
buffer vowel)
3
23%
11
35%
-tVd(e)/-dVd(e)
(buffer vowel)
11
77%
21
65%
I submit that the frequency of the sequence –ded(e)/-ted(e) had increased
dramatically due to the influx of French words, all of which were assigned the
suffix –ed(e). This difference can be viewed in two ways. One, the number of
dental-final verbs with a buffer vowel in the suffix increased. Two, and I believe
more importantly, the productivity of the suffix with the buffer vowel increased.
The latter can be illustrated using Fisher’s Exact Test on the 2-by-2 table in Table
5.11, comparing the distribution of productive tokens in M1 and M2 taken from
Tables 5.6 and . The resulting p-value is less than .001.
As a result of the increase in productivity of the form with the buffer vowel,
the sequence –tede/-dede was no longer so rare in the language. These changes,
combined with the fact that alternation already existed in native English words,
as in putte vs. puttede39 , led to the suffix with a buffer vowel becoming the default
151
Table 5.11: M1 and M2 Productive Allomorphy
-t(e)/-d(e) (no
buffer vowel)
M1 75
M2 11
-tVd(e)/-dVd(e)
(buffer vowel)
20
21
even for verbs ending in a dental. This development was part of a more general
ME tendency, explored by Minkova (to appear), for the weak preterite allomorphy
to reflect the phonotactics of the stem.
To summarize the M2 findings, disyllabic French loanwords abounded. They
ignored the allomorphy that was sensitive to the final consonant of the stem, and
all took the preterite suffix with a buffer vowel. This, combined with the existing
free variation of suffixes, led to a shift in the default from –d(e) to –ed(e). The
latter remains the default suffix for PDE dental-final verbs.
5.2.5
M3 and M4 (1350-1500)
The period M3 of the Penn-Helsinki Corpus covers the dates from approximately
1350 to 1420, and M4 the dates from 1420 to 1500. I treat them as a unit for
two reasons. First, none of the relevant properties, such as importance of French
loanwords or syllable count of French vs. native verbs, differs in any interesting
way between M3 and M4. Second, combining the data allows for a sufficiently
large sample size to obtain statistically significant conclusions. During the M3
and M4 periods, just as in M1 and M2, the preterite suffix without a buffer vowel
predominates among native dental-final verbs, and the suffix with a vowel among
dental-final verbs borrowed from French. These results are summarized in Table
152
5.12.
Table 5.12: M3 and M4 Allomorphy
#
%
#
%
of
of
of
of
native tokens
native tokens
OF tokens
OF tokens
-t(e)/-d(e) (no
buffer vowel)
9441
90%
47
6%
-tVd(e)/-dVd(e)
(buffer vowel)
109
10%
716
94%
Beginning with the M3 period, if not in fact with the M2 period, there is
no sure method for determining productivity of suffixes in native dental-final.
Employing the same method for M3 as used above for M2 and M1 yields 71 tokens
of productive –ed(e) and 123 tokens of –de/-te. Of the latter, 82 are accounted for
by the verb put, which is surely of sufficiently high frequency that its preterites are
inherited from earlier periods more often than generated afresh. Yet alternation
continues to exist: e.g. cut/cutted, cast/casted, set/setted. The safest method is
to look at the verbal system as a whole, and to interpolate a description of the M3
period from facts known about the surrounding chronological periods. Minkova
(to appear) finds that by the second half of ME, the weak preterite allomorphy
is governed largely by phonotactics. The influx of French verbs appearing in M2
led to the buffer vowel suffix being favored for dental-final verbs, and we saw
the preference change even for native words. The preference for the buffer vowel
continues in PDE, though generation of preterites such as knit is still possible. In
the second half of ME, it is reasonable to conclude that freshly generated preterites
could take either suffix, though the buffer vowel was preferred.
Two features of M3 and M4 are different from previous periods. For one, the
proportion of French loanwords in the lexicon increases, shown in Table 5.13. They
153
make up more than half the types of dental-final verb preterites, and 25-30% of the
tokens. The disparity between types and tokens is caused by the high token frequency of native words, which form the core vocabulary of the language, especially
went, which accounts for half the native tokens. Many individual French40 words
were borrowed and used infrequently, sometimes only in writing for the purpose at
hand, hence the high type frequency. The decline of French as a spoken language
is perhaps reflected in the slight decline of the proportion of tokens between M3
and M4.
Table 5.13: Old French Dental-Final Verbs in ME
M1 M2 M3
M4
OF types, % of total 11% 38% 56.00% 64%
OF tokens, % of total 5% 18% 30.00% 25%
Another interesting pattern in the French data lies in the forms that have a
preterite with no buffer vowel. The forms without a buffer vowel constitute a
higher percentage of the monosyllabic verbs than of the polysyllabic verbs. In
Table 5.14, the percentage of monosyllabic verbs that have no buffer vowel is
shown to be roughly twice that of the di- and polysyllabic verbs. Recall that in
the M1 period, the only French dental-final verb to have a suffix without a buffer
vowel was the monosyllabic rest.
Table 5.14: M3 and M4 Syllable Count Vis-à-Vis Preterite Allomorphy
# types w/o
buffer vowel
monosyllabic
841
di- or polysyllabic 1242
# tokens w/o
buffer vowel
19
28
% tokens w/o
buffer vowel
10%
5%
With the combined corpora of the M3 and M4 periods, a z-test shows that
154
p < 0.05 for the difference in proportions, so the difference can be taken to be
statistically significant. Monosyllabic dental-final verbs borrowed from French are
more likely to have a preterite with no buffer vowel than disyllabic or polysyllabic verbs are. This provides further support for the hypothesis that it was the
overwhelming disyllabicity of the French loanwords that caused early dental-final
verbs to be assigned to the default category of preterite-marking. It is important to remember that the allomorph without the buffer vowel is not exclusive to
monosyllables at any stage. Prefixed native verbs take this suffix from the earliest
ME to PDE—e.g. upset—and as Table 5.14 shows, disyllabic French loanwords
might use this suffix as well.
5.2.6
Early Modern and Present Day English
Increased standardization of the English language has led to reduced variation
among the weak past tenses. Among dental-final verbs, however, a fair amount
of variation remains. Merriam-Webster lists, for example, fit/fitted, bet/betted,
knit/knitted, and Pinker (1999: 61) discusses in addition pet vs. petted. Other
verbs such as whet/whetted have shown alternation in EMnE but do not usually
alternate at present. For this section, I refer to the continuation of the verbs with
no buffer vowel in the preterite suffix as the “no-change” verbs, due to the phonetic
loss of the final schwa and degemination of the geminate dental stop. The suffix
itself is the zero allomorph. ME putte > PDE put. Preterites with the full suffix,
such as knitted, are referred to as “overtly marked” preterites.
Continuing the theme of the present work, we may examine the set of verbs
that has displayed alternation between no-change and overtly marked preterites in
English, and seek to explain which verbs ended up with which suffix in PDE. Keep
155
in mind that the default is now overtly marked preterites, yet no-change preterites
remain a sufficiently large class to attract new members. For the set of verbs that
have a history of alternation, I use the list of PDE no-change preterites from
Quirk et al. (1985: 110-122), the Penn-Helsinki parsed corpora of Middle English
and of Early Modern English, and the irregular verb lists from the eighteenthand nineteenth-century grammarians in Greenwood (1711), Kirkby (1746), Fisher
(1750), Lowth (1762), Ward (1765), Fell (1784), Smith (1864), and Greene (1867).
The list of collected verbs is presented in Table 5.15, along with their frequencies
from the CELEX database (Baayen et al. 1995). Judgments of readers as to the
preterites used in their own speech may vary.
156
Table 5.15: PDE Allomorphy of Dental-Final Verbs
Zero Allomorph
put
let
set
cut
hit
spread
shut
hurt
beat
cost
cast
burst
split
bet
thrust
shed
quit
spit
slit
bid
knit
shit
wet
wed
rid
Average
CELEX
preterite frequency
1367
782
520
325
160
132
129
108
103
72
63
55
54
41
27
24
21
7
6
6
5
3
2
1
0
161
Overtly marked CELEX
preterite frequency
43
wanted
1200
started
726
lifted
146
granted
118
fitted
60
rested
54
trusted
53
parted
40
heated
32
dreaded
16
knitted
12
roasted
12
shrouded
11
sweated
10
shielded
8
fretted
5
rotted
5
wafted
5
whetted
2
fasted
1
voided
1
wedded
1
thirsted
0
Average
109
In a frequency-based approach, irregular forms are expected to have higher
frequency than regular forms. This is borne out by the frequency counts in Table
5.15, where the average frequency of the irregulars is 161 and the regulars is 109.
Additionally, the lower frequency verbs in the no-change column are more subject
to alternation: bet/betted, spit/spat, bid/bad(e), knit/knitted, shit/shitted/shat,
wet/wetted, wed/wedded. Unlike the strong verbs, where most irregular forms are
157
inherited from OE, only dread, heat, knit, sweat, shield, fast, thirst, set, spread,
and shut had the sequences –tte or –dde in OE. The only case where an OE verb
with –ede has a no-change preterite in PDE is wed, which also permits wedded.
Another pattern in the no-change verbs is apparent: a short vowel followed
immediately by the dental stop, with no intervening consonant. Of 25 no-change
verbs, 20, or 80%, have simple codas, compared to only 12 simple codas, or 52%,
among the 23 verbs with overtly marked preterites. The exceptions are beat, cast,
cost, hurt, and thrust, which have complex codas and no overtly marked preterite,
and dread, knit, sweat, fret, rot, fit, and whet, which have simple codas and only
overtly marked preterites in CELEX. Of those, Merriam-Webster lists no-change
preterites for fit and sweat. The frequency of the irregular exceptions is expected
to be higher than the regular exceptions, and indeed, the average frequency of
beat, cast, cost, hurt, and thrust is 64, and the average frequency of dread, knit,
sweat, fret, rot, fit, and whet is but 16.
It is not possible to explain the outcome of each and every verb, but the general
tendencies can be summed up. The default suffix for dental-final verbs gradually
in ME became the one with the buffer vowel. However, the suffix with no buffer
vowel, which became the zero allomorph, remained and remains a viable option.
It may be attached to monosyllables ending in a dental stop, and is more likely
to catch on and become the usual form if the verb has a short/lax vowel followed
immediately by the dental. This pattern stays true to its ME origin, in that the
reason most no-change verb preterites have a short vowel is that they originated
in a class of verbs to which the rule of pre-cluster shortening was applied, followed
by a loss of the preterite suffix. If the stem vowel was long, the result was ablaut,
as in feed ∼ fed. If the vowel was short, as in put ∼ put, a no-change verb arose.
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The morphological category of unmarked preterites was thus associated with the
phonological feature of short vowels from its earliest history. The category has
proved resistant to the entry of members with long vowels. The only instance of
a long vowel in PDE is in beat. The irregularity of beat was commented on by
Walker (1791), who records that a short-vowel preterite bet existed at the time in
Ireland, but was not considered good usage in England.
Walker correctly observed that no-change verbs are dispreferred by speakers
because they are not overtly marked for tense, which creates an obstacle to comprehension44 . The distributional account presented above, namely that the influx
of French verbs changed the proportions of preterite suffixes used with dental-final
verbs, may have been what initially triggered the English speakers’ preference for
the suffix with the buffer vowel, but the functional account surely contributed.
The loss in later ME and in EMnE of final weak syllables and eventually of most
of the personal endings from the verb was what led the competition between two
variant suffixes to become a competition between an overt suffix and a zero allomorph. This created a new means of marking past tense in English, and it created
one more reason to disprefer, though not to eliminate entirely, the shut ∼ shut
type.
The competing principle Walker discusses is conservatism of inherited forms:
everyone says beat with a long vowel, so everyone continues to say it. In Section
5.2.2 an additional competing principle was seen that allows no-change preterites
to exist: the violations of the Repeated Morph Constraint and/or the OCP by
regularly marked forms such as beated. These two principles continue to be in
competition as speakers decide between pet and petted.45
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5.3
Dental-Final Strong Verbs
In the history of English, there have been two major productive patterns among
verbs that end in dentals and form the preterite by changing their vowel. One
is the pattern whereby the vowel of the present and preterite are historically the
same in quality and differ only in quantity. The other pattern is a preterite ending
in /æt/.
These have their origin in weak verbs with a long vowel in the present, which
was shortened before the cluster formed in the preterite, e.g. feed ∼ fed from ME
fēdan ∼ fedde. They thus share an origin with the no-change verbs, which differed
from these verbs in having a short vowel throughout the paradigm: set ∼ set
from setten ∼ sette. The Great Vowel Shift eliminated the qualitative similarity
between the vowels of the present and of the preterite, by shifting the long vowels
and leaving the short vowels untouched. Thus /fi:d/ ∼ /fEd/ arose from /fe:d/ ∼
/fEd/. The class itself, however, remains productive.
In Chapter 4, it was argued that, as a rule, strong verb preterites prefer long
vowels to short. One of the two systematic exceptions was verbs that end in
dentals. The product-oriented schema that prefers short vowels before dentals
arose through the pre-cluster shortening that produced such preterites as fed and
set. It was shown that participles with short vowels do not replace preterites with
long vowels, but rather the reverse. Thus participial /bO:r/ replaced preterite
/bær/, but the Class I preterites such as /drO:v/ remained. In the case of dentalfinal Class I verbs, short vowel preterites abound. The lists of the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century grammarians include such patterns as write ∼ writ (Greenwood
1711; Fisher 1750), ride ∼ rid (Greenwood; Fisher; Fell 1784; Greene 1867), and
stride ∼ strid (Smith 1864; Greene). Additionally, the OED records glid from the
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17th to 19th centuries and notes that it might be used today “without causing
surprise” (s.v.), and smit in the 16th and 17th centuries.
There are no examples in Greenwood, Fisher, Fell, Green, Smith, Ward, Lowth,
or Kirkby of preterites ris, striv, driv, shriv, thriv, or shin, though ris has been
produced as a reduced participle46 . The distribution is best explained by the two
competing principles of preferring long vowels in strong preterites, and preferring
short vowels before dentals.
The most prescriptive of the grammarians, Lowth (1762), includes none of
fit, writ, strid, rid, and glid, indicating that perhaps the conservative desire of the
prescriptive grammarians to retain the inherited pasts and ignore recent analogical
creations played a role in the survival of wrote, strode, and rode. Greene (1867)
likewise disapproved of smit and fit.
The only PDE verb for which the preterite ends exclusively in /æt/ or /æd/
is sit ∼ sat. Spit has the alternate preterite spit, and shit the preterites shit and
shitted. Bid has the alternate preterites bid and bade /beid/, which may also be
pronounced /bæd/. In the case of bid ∼ bad(e) and sit ∼ sat, the /æ/ preterite
is the inherited one. The inherited preterite of spit is spit, and the preterite spat
is attested in the 16th century. Shit should conjugate shite ∼ shote ∼ shitten,
coming as it does from the OE Class I verb scītan. The first quotation of shat in
the OED dates to 1929, but because this is a taboo word, the appearance of forms
in writing may significantly postdate their emergence in speech.
Other verbs also acquired preterites in /æt/ that were not original to them.
Put, in the north of England, acquired pat and pitten/putten in the 15th century,
hit acquired hat and hitten in the 17th, and knit acquired knat in the north of
England at least by the 19th century, judging by the earliest quotation in the
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OED.
5.4
5.4.1
Causes of the Strong ∼ Weak Instability
Shift or Merely Flux?
A frequent premise of works on the history of English strong verbs is that they
are doomed to become weak. For example, Lieberman et al. (2007) present the
development of irregular verbs as a steady-state decay, akin to radioactive decay.
Fertig (2009) challenges Lieberman et al. on this premise. He enumerates the
verbs that have been misclassified as examples of the shift from strong to weak,
and having eliminated these misclassified verbs, he recomputes the extent of loss
of strong inflection. Beginning with a set of 293 strong verbs in OE, he finds the
following outcomes:
103 suffered lexical loss without having become weak.
65 remain entirely strong in PDE.
2347 represent the falling together of a strong and weak pair, resulting in a
weak verb
2848 became weak, but retain some irregularity in PDE.
7449 became completely regular weak verbs
In the most extreme case, then, 28 + 23 + 74 became weak. Subtracting the 24
that underwent lexical loss, there are a total of 101 weak and 65 strong strong in
PDE from the set of OE strong verbs. This makes a 60% to 40% balance in favor
of weak, and does not even include the examples given by Fertig of the reverse
trend: weak verbs becoming strong. Fertig’s conclusion is that analogical change
is not unidirectional, inevitably leading to the shift from strong to weak; there is
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some exchange in both directions, and more robustness on the part of strong verbs
than has previously been recognized.
In this section, I address Krygier’s treatment of this premise. The title of his
book, The Disintegration of the English Strong Verb System (1994), highlights
his belief in the doom of the strong verbs. Consider the statement that “All
indications are that in the 14th century strong verbs were proceeding fast on the
road to oblivion” (194). This statement is not borne out by the fact that some 40%
of the verb set remain entirely strong in PDE, and it derives from a methodological
error on his part. Krygier considers the mere occurrence of a weak preterite or
participle equivalent to the loss of strong inflection. Any verb that exhibits a weak
form in ME is said to have “undergone the shift (from strong to weak).” If this
were the case, we would expect virtually no strong verbs to have survived to PDE.
In truth, however, a ME verb may display only a very few weak forms among a
predominance of strong forms, and there is no reason to expect the same outcome
from this verb as from a verb that displays only weak forms in ME. This is one
of the pitfalls of Krygier’s approach, which looks only at types, never at tokens.
More accurate is Welna’s account:
“The most important development in the strong verb system was their partial
[SB: emphasis mine] shift to weak verbs. Although in ME only a few former strong
verbs became totally weak (cf. chew, dive, etc.), almost all verbs developed weak
endings which survived in parallel use with the strong forms. In their subsequent
development now the weak, now the strong type prevailed, but sometimes both
types continue in Standard English” (1996: 120).
Though Krygier’s presentation of the ME data suffers from a serious flaw in
ignoring the fact that not all verbs exhibiting weak forms became weak in PDE,
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it is possible to reinterpret the strong-to-weak “shift” as a flux or instability and
carry on. Krygier’s work asks what the causes of the shift are; we may ask what
the causes of the sudden instability are, and this is an equally valid, albeit less
drastic, question. It is not the case that all strong verbs in OE or PDE exhibit
this alternation with weak forms, so why did the ME strong verbs fluctuate to
such a degree?
The many language-internal factors behind strong and weak inflection have
been explored in this dissertation. However, the sudden change between the state
of strong verbs in OE and in EME coincides with the Norman invasion, and calls
for language-external factors to be explored as well. Three major hypotheses have
been offered for the sudden instability in ME. One proposed factor is the influx of
French verbs, which were nearly all inflected weak. Another is the hypothesis that
native speakers of French mislearned English, being led astray by the similarity
between dental-final strong verbs and the weak dental preterite. The third is the
disruption of the OE literary standard by the Norman invasion.
5.4.2
Influx of French Loanwords
The fact that the Norman invasion had a huge effect on the vocabulary of English
is inarguable, as is the fact that virtually all verbs borrowed from French were
inflected weak. At first glance, it was entirely possible that enough verbs were
borrowed from French that the ratio of weak to strong verbs increased substantially. As a result, more native English verbs may have come to be inflected weak
than otherwise would have. This hypothesis, proposed by Strang (1970), is also
accepted by Nielsen (1997) in his review of Krygier’s monograph. It resembles
the hypothesis of the present chapter, that the influx of French dental-final verbs
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inflected with a buffer vowel in the weak preterite led to more native words being
inflected that way.
However, the hypothesis depends on the overall number of borrowed French
verbs being sufficiently high to change the existing ratio of strong ∼ weak, a
hypothesis that my research has not borne out. The vast majority of French
loanwords were nouns and adjectives. Nouns and adjectives are in general more
frequently borrowed than verbs (van Hout and Muysken 1994), as their referents
are easier to identify. Pointing to a verb is more difficult. Dekeyser (1986) computes the impact of Romance loans in the ME lexicon, and finds that only 10% of
Romance borrowings were verbs.
Using LAEME, I computed the proportion of strong and weak verbs for EME
by searching the dictionaries of forms for the tags “vSpt” (verb in the strong
preterite) and “vpt” (verb in the weak preterite). The result roughly represents
the number of types in each category, although prefixed verbs are counted as
separate types. Quirk and Wrenn (1957) computed the proportion of strong and
weak verbs for OE. The results are presented in Table 5.16.
Table 5.16: Proportions of Strong and Weak Verbs
% strong verbs
% weak verbs
Old English Early Middle English
25%
27%
∼ 75%50
73%
The difference between the proportions of strong and weak verbs in OE and
EME is not significant. Moreover, it should be taken into account that all strong
verbs in LAEME that have weak forms are counted in both categories, so the weak
verb percentage is slightly higher as a result. The fact that the proportions have
not changed significantly can be attributed to two factors. First, the relatively
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low number of verbs that were borrowed, as already discussed. Second, lexical
loss among verbs inherited from OE is predicted to be higher in weak verbs, which
contain more low frequency members.
5.4.3
Normans and Dental-Final Verbs
A lexical disturbance of the balance by loanwords is unlikely to have triggered the
major instability of ME strong verb inflection. Krygier’s hypothesis depends even
more directly on the influence of the Normans. He proposes that the Normans
learning English realized that the majority of past tenses ended in dentals. This
led them to misinterpret some dental-final strong verbs as weak. For example, the
strong preterite plural of bītan ‘bite’ was biton. Were it a weak verb of Class I, it
would be bītton, with, perhaps, pre-cluster shortening: bitton. Krygier proposes
that native Anglo-Saxon speakers then heard the members of the prestige register
of English assigning weak inflection to what they, the native speakers, knew to
be strong verbs. The native speakers took this to mean that strong verbs were
unfashionable, and they began to produce weak forms for all strong verbs.
Attributing the source of any major grammatical change to the Normans is
considered a dicey prospect, as the Normans at their peak constituted at most
10% of the population, and probably far less than that (Berndt 1965, in Lass
1969). Krygier attempts to get around this problem by positing a conscious,
sociolinguistically-driven phenomenon. His hypothesis does not require native
speakers of French to have imposed their own French grammatical structures on
English, but only to have learned English incompletely for English-internal reasons, and to have been imitated by native speakers, who formed the overwhelming
majority of the population. It does not require a majority of speakers to have had
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any familiarity with French at all, only contact with French speakers speaking
English.
However, the plausibility of this prestige register’s existence having an impact
of this extent on the grammar has been called into question (Nielsen 1997). Even
positing its existence for the sake of argument, the impact Krygier wishes it to have
had on the grammar of English is implausibly far-reaching. I find it possible that
the Norman French speakers learning English as adults would have overapplied
the weak suffix. I find it conceivable that some native speakers of English, wishing
to facilitate communication with those who understood English poorly, may have
deliberately overapplied the weak suffix. However, the idea that all these native
speakers then went home and in front of their own children, who were not learning
French as a native language, produced weak forms because the Norman upper
class did, is an unmotivated leap, given the small proportion of French speakers
in England.
Thomason and Kaufman (1988) have presented evidence that in situations
where one language group takes over another, lexical influence is more likely to
move from the conquerors to the conquered, and grammatical influence from the
conquered to the conquerors. Thus, they say, even if we did not know a priori
that French formed a superstratum of English at one time, we would have reason
to believe it from the lexicon (116). The fact that the Normans constituted such
a very small part of the population is a major stumbling block for the hypothesis
of direct grammatical impact on the strong verbs.
Moreover, a passage from Lass (1987: 60) illustrates a major weakness in the
prestige hypothesis: the prestige language of the upper classes was French, and
to a lesser extent, Latin, not English. The written texts of ME appear in the
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dialects of those writing them, until the 14th century, when speech proper to the
area around London began to be perceived as a standard dialect. If there was
no written standard for English, still less was there likely to be a spoken prestige
register. If the upper classes considered French to be the prestige language, and
did not value English enough to learn it properly, as Krygier hypothesizes, still less
would the lower classes value the broken English of the upper classes and imitate
in their own speech the errors made by Normans.
5.4.4
Interruption of the Scribal Standard
The third explanation for the instability, the interruption of the English literary standard by the Norman invasion, has been proposed in two different forms.
Faiß(1977) asserts that the written poetic standard of OE was conservative. Baugh
and Cable (1978) emphasize the lack of education of English speakers after the
Conquest, which Krygier, rightly in my opinion, does not accept. Literacy was
far from universal in the OE period, and it is improbable that the speech of the
average Anglo-Saxon was influenced by education and a written standard. What
is probable is that the written records of OE do not reflect the speech of the average Anglo-Saxon at the time, and that this is the reason for the sudden instability
of verbal inflection in ME. In the first place, the written standard of OE may
be taken to be quite conservative, especially in view of the high degree of orthographic consistency relative to ME—not relative to PDE. In the second place, the
majority of the extant OE corpus is from West Saxon, which was not the direct
ancestor of ME dialects.
As Krygier demonstrates (see the introduction and Appendix 1 of this dissertation), there was a certain amount of strong ∼ weak alternation already present
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in OE (1994: 59-65). We may assume that the alternation was greater in the spoken language. Writings in OE do not reflect actual speech as closely as writings
in ME. Furthermore, Krygier, following Seebold (1970), shows that the strong ∼
weak alternation was greatest in the Northumbrian dialect. This may reflect Old
Norse influence, as Krygier argues, or it may reflect a state of affairs where West
Saxon was more conservative than other dialects, causing greater fluctuation in
ME than the extant corpus of OE would otherwise lead us to expect.
If the instability of inflection began in OE and was somewhat more prevalent
than we can tell directly from OE, we can posit language-internal reasons for it
to have escalated in spoken ME. Bloomfield writes,
“We do not know why speakers sometimes utter new combinations instead of
traditional forms, and why the new combinations sometimes rise in frequency...It
seems that at any one stage of a language, certain features are relatively stable and
others relatively unstable. We must suppose that in the sixteenth century, owing to
antecedent developments, there were enough alternative plural-forms (say, eyen :
eyes, shoon : shoes, brethren : brothers) to make an innovation like cows relatively
inconspicuous and acceptable. At present, an innovation like foots seems to have
no chance of survival when it is produced from time to time” (1933: 409-410).
He continues along similar lines:
“Some [Middle English] nouns fluctuated: [feld] ’field,’ plural [’felda] or [’feldas].
We do not know the origin of this fluctuation, but, once granted its existence, we
can see in it a favoring condition for the spread of the [-as]-plural. A neologism like
[’sunas] instead of older [’suna] ’sons’ would perhaps have had no better chance of
success than a modern foots, had it not been for the familiar fluctuation in cases
like the word ’field.’ ” (1933: 409-410)51
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For whatever reason, the instability that began in OE spread to include nearly
every ME strong verb. The alternation in one verb permitted the alternation in
another verb to pass as legitimate free variation rather than a mere speech error.
If Krygier is correct, and dental-final strong verbs in the 12th century are more
likely to appear with weak forms than verbs of other stem types, this need not
only have pertained to non-native speakers. If the alternation between strong and
weak was already sporadically in place in OE, incipient degemination in EME
may have led native speakers to the same analogy that Krygier attributes to the
Normans. This development may have been what opened the floodgates, allowing
the sporadic OE strong ∼ weak instability to spread to nearly every verb in ME,
without the need to invoke the Normans as the immediate trigger.
Perhaps partly because this instability ran its course naturally, and no doubt
partly because of the rise of a standard register and the idea that some linguistic
variants were superior to others, the amount of inflectional variation in the strong
verbs was much reduced in Early Modern English. Some free variation remains,
e.g. spit/spat and dived/dove, and dialectal variation remains, but Welna’s summary of the ME state of affairs, that nearly every strong verb had a competing
weak ending, no longer applies to English, at least in the standard dialect.
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Chapter 6
Quantification
6.1
Introduction
This chapter synthesizes the conclusions reached in the previous chapters. First
a brief summary describes how the relevant factors combined in the grammar to
determine the inflectional outcome of the strong verbs. Then a statistical model
that quantifies these factors is described, and the factors are analyzed in terms of
whether the model finds them to be significant or not.52 In the process of analyzing
the model, the interaction of different factors is seen. Finally, I use the model to
test the possible effect of a factor deemed relevant by Welna (1991), namely the
presence of a bilabial in the coda.
Chapter 2 studied the effects of frequency. The effects of high token frequency
on preserving strong inflection have long been recognized. High frequency verbs are
on the whole more conservative in their morphology and low frequency verbs less
conservative. One contribution of this work has been to make full use of frequency
data from historical corpora that have recently become available. The Linguistic
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Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) in particular is a great benefit, as it opens
up to us a period previously the most difficult to study, despite its importance
as a turning point for many aspects in the history of English. Previous studies
on the history of English have not had access to such easily accessible corpora,
and studies carried out by theoretical linguists have largely dispensed with the
historical data. One study that I am aware of, Hare and Elman (1995), has made
use of historical frequency data. Comparing a concordance of Old English (OE)
(Di Paolo Healey and Venezky 1980) and a concordance of the works of Chaucer
(Tatlock and Kennedy 1963), they found no significant changes in frequency. They
did not compare these data to Present Day English (PDE) data, which I have done
using the CELEX (Baayen et al. 1995) database.
My study found that the relative frequency of most verbs was stable over time;
however, several verbs have either increased or decreased in frequency. In some
cases, e.g. come, the PDE inflection corresponds with the PDE frequency, while
in others, e.g. slay, the PDE inflection corresponds with the Middle English (ME)
frequency. For example, slay is now much less frequent, having been replaced by
kill, yet it remains strong. In contrast, warp was replaced by throw and became
weak. One of the contributions of this dissertation is to identify such words and
explain their development. Section 3.1 demonstrates the benefits of using both
the LAEME and CELEX corpora over using only one or the other.
Type frequency proves nearly impossible to encode directly for ME, and difficult to a lesser extent for later periods, but it emerges in the present model
indirectly, in the following manner. Types are encoded directly, by marking a
verb with the features it shares with other verbs. Features that are shared by
many verbs, i.e. the cases where the type frequency is high, are more salient than
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features shared by only a few verbs.
Chapter 3 investigated the effects of cue validity. It was argued that verbs
that have preterites that begin with consonant clusters and end with <-ew> are
more likely to remain strong than such verbs that do not begin with consonant
clusters. This pattern was explained with reference both to type frequencies and
to phonological similarities. ME words of the form CCew signalled the past tense
better than words of the form Cew, because a greater proportion of the CCew
words were strong preterites, relative to the number of nouns, adjectives, and
present tense verbs. Moreover verbs that shared a /lew/ or /rew/ sequence were
more similar, allowing them to reinforce each other to a greater degree than verbs
that shared only /ew/.
The presence of consonant clusters was adduced as an explanatory factor in
survival because of the mismatch between LAEME frequencies and PDE outcome
of <ew> preterites. Once-infrequent verbs such as throw and grow had strong
preterites of sufficient salience that at the time when the lexemes became more
frequent, they had not yet become weak. They thus contrast with a verb like walk,
which had become weak by the time its frequency increased. The advantage of
threw and grew was their CCew structure. Similarly, when once-frequent verbs
became infrequent, their strong preterites had better chances of survival if they
were of the shape CCew. Thus slew survived even when slay was replaced by kill,
but sew was lost at approximately the same time as the frequency of sow declines
in the written records. The role attributed to phonological similarity in the verbs
throw, grow, slay stems from the idea that survival of very low-frequency strong
preterites is inextricably tied up with their generation. This is especially clear
in the case of slew, which was not the original preterite, but was generated often
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enough to catch on. It survived partly because it matched an existing pattern, in
contrast to sow. It survived also partly because speakers have instances of slew
stored in their memories, in contrast to play, where they have only played stored.
In Section 3.2 of this chapter, the explanatory power of the feature CCew is
formally tested in a mathematical model, and its interactions with both ME and
PDE frequencies are explored.
Chapter 4 argued that vowel quantity played an important role in strong verb
inflection. Long vowels were preferred over short, for both distributional and perceptual reasons. Long vowels arose elsewhere in verbal paradigms, and spread
analogically into the parts of the paradigm where they did not arise phonologically. Moreover, vowels in strong verbs carry the grammatical information of
tense inflection, and long vowels are more easily heard; thus they function better
in strong preterites. The advantages of long vowels had two effects. One, verbs
with the shortest vowels, those before certain consonant clusters, became weak.
This includes verbs of originally low frequency, such as walk, that became more
frequent; verbs of originally high frequency, such as warp, that became less frequent; verbs of consistently low frequency, such as melt; and verbs of consistently
high frequency, such as help. In all cases, the strong preterite was not sufficiently
salient to survive, either with the support of frequency or despite it. Two, verbs
where several strong preterites competed in ME, were reduced in favor of variants
with long vowels in Early Modern English (EMnE). This preference for long vowels
was aided in many cases by type frequency, in that a variant with /O:/ was found
in very many verbs of originally different inflection, e.g. drove, froze, broke, and
wove.
Section 3.4 of this chapter models the effects of quantity and its interaction
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with other factors, in particular the large class of exceptions found among verbs
conjugating like sing ∼ sang ∼ sung or sting ∼ stung.
Chapter 5 extended the scope of the study to include verbs that were not originally strong, but that became irregular—either strong or no-change—as the result
of phonological change. The no-change verbs were explored in particular detail.
They arose from the addition of an allomorph of the regular weak preterite suffix,
in cases where the verb stem ended in a dental stop. This dissertation identifies
a series of events that led to the declining use of this allomorph with dental-final
verbs. First, the OE system of productive prefixation was replaced with a system
of phrasal verbs. The result was that most English verbs were monosyllabic. An influx of predominantly disyllabic French verbs were recognizably foreign-sounding,
except in cases where the prefix was recognizable and the root monosyllabic, and
they did not conform to native phonotactic preferences. The default suffix was
added to almost all French loanwords ending in dentals. This created a distributional preference among dental-final verbs for the now more common default
suffix, which had a buffer vowel between the dental of the stem and the dental of
the preterite. The eventual loss of final vowels added a functional reason: presents
and preterites became homophonous, as in cut ∼ cut, which did not permit the
overt marking of past tense. The change of preferred suffix for dental-final verbs
from OE to PDE was thus the result of both distributional and functional reasons.
The identification of role of the French verbs and the close attention to the use
of the competing suffixes among dental-final native words are new contributions
of this dissertation. The results of Chapter 5 are not included in the model in
Sections 2 and 3, but the section devoted to outlining prospects for further work
on the subject discusses how these results might be added to a more complex
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model.
6.2
The Model
The most important factors that the present work hypothesizes to be relevant for
the survival or loss of strong inflection are token frequency, type frequency, the
CCew structure, and vowel quantity. In addition to these factors, I test a factor
hypothesized by Welna (1991: 133) to be relevant: the presence of a final labial
stop.
In order to investigate the statistical significance and explanatory power of
the described factors, a binary logistic regression model is used. The dependent
variable is the inflectional outcome, and because the outcome is either strong or
weak, a binary model is appropriate. They independent variables are frequency,
CCew structure, vowel quantity, and the presence of a final bilabial stop. The
logistic regression model operates by plotting the dependent variable, outcome,
against the independent variables, creating an n-dimensional graph, where n is
the number of independent variables. Best-fit lines are generated to explain the
distribution of the strong and weak verbs in terms of the independent variables.
The model’s goodness of fit is determined using the Akaike Information Criterion
(AIC), which rewards success in accounting for the outcomes of verbs and penalizes
the number of variables. A model that explained each and every verb accurately,
but with a different account for each verb and no commonalities among different
verbs, would be a poor model indeed. The lower the AIC figure, the better the
model is (Akaike 1974).
The logistic model was implemented using the statistics software program R,
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using the glm() function53 . In order to make my work as transparent and as
replicable as possible, this paper includes the code used at each step to generate
the results. It is to be hoped that others will find this useful and will be able
to build on it, adding new or more precise data, as well as further hypothesized
independent variables.
The greatest difficulty in seeking to set up a single model to test the hypothesized variables is that the study is diachronic, covering the span from OE to PDE.
Many features of the data changed over time, and certain variables were relevant
at certain periods and not at others. For the most part, collapsing the history of
the strong verbs can be done without internal contradiction, but at times it will
be necessary to run a test, make a change, and run the test with the change, then
compare the two. Details of the adjustments necessary to represent a diachronic
model are presented in sections 6.2.1 - 6.2.4.
6.2.1
Frequency
The token frequency data have been gathered from LAEME, for Early Middle
English (EME), and CELEX, for PDE. The data can be found in Chapter 2 and
Appendix 2. In both cases, the number given represents all instances of verb
forms in the corpus. Including both corpora—and the effects of each are tested
separately—is a means of encoding the diachronic nature of the study. Though
Hare and Elman (1995) found no substantive differences between the frequencies
of OE and ME verbs, the difference between the EME and PDE frequencies of
some verbs is great enough to warrant studying whether the model benefits from
including both.
Type frequency has proven almost impossible to encode directly, as noted in
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section 6.1. There exists a standard division of OE strong verbs into seven classes,
which, along with the sensible subdivisions used by Krygier, is entered into the
model. One additional subdivision, the separation of the Class III verbs that later
underwent Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, such as find, from the rest of the
Class III verbs, such as sing, was deemed appropriate, because from EME on,
these clearly belonged to different classes. Along similar lines, /a:u/ and /o:u/
merged in EME, and the verbs grōwan and crāwan, for example, became members
of the same subclass. Thus, the separate subclasses VIIe and VIIf in Krygier’s
classification are collapsed in this model to VIIef. A few individual verbs that
changed classes are assigned to classes into which they shifted, Specifically, these
verb reassignments are stick, which shifted from Class V to Class III, and fly, which
shifted from Class II to Class VIIef, and draw and slay which shifted from Class
VI to class VIIef. Such a treatment is not given to shit, which is treated as a weak
verb originally belonging to Class I. The justification for this treatment is that we
are interested in testing the frequency hypothesis. Verbs of lower frequency are
expected to become weak, and shit did become weak. It later acquired a strong
inflection because of its phonological shape, but that was a separate, much later
development. Chapter 5, section 3 discusses the difficulties of determining the
spoken frequency of shit, as well as the development of its strong preterite. The
assignment of verbs to OE classes, otherwise nearly identical to that in Krygier
(1994: 255-267), is presented in Table 6.1.
A variable was created in R that holds the information on OE class membership for each verb. It should be tested not only for whether its effectiveness is
statistically significant, but for whether its effects are overwhelmingly dominated
by one class. For this purpose, I created a separate category for membership in
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Table 6.1: Assignment of Verbs to OE Classes
Class I
Class II
Class IIIa
Class IIIb
Class IIIc
Class IIId
Class IV
Class V
Class VI
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
VIIa
VIIb
VIIc
VIId
VIIef
rise write bide drive ride smite shrive shine bite glide gripe slide
strike writhe stride shit whine
flee choose lie (weak) fly shoot brook creep chew seethe brew
sprout freeze reek sneeze
(be)gin sing run win drink stink spring sting wring sink swim
stecan climb cling sling swing shrink spin fling slink
find bind wind grind
help yield warp swallow mourn carve starve delve smart swell
spurn
fight burst thresh/thrash
come bear break steal tear shear
see give stand bid sit get eat wreak wash mete reap tread
weave knead speak
take draw slay swear (for)sake wake heave laugh shake wade
ache shove step flay gnaw grave bake shave lade
shed
beat leap hew
hold fall lie (strong) wax fold salt
(all members underwent lexical loss before PDE)
let know sleep sow blow flow grow mow throw low row
crow glow
Class IIIa, which is recognized by all scholars as a robust class that attracts new
members. The effects of the overall class membership are tested for any additional
explanatory power beyond that of membership in Class IIIa.
Subsequent to OE, however, there exists no agreed-upon classification, and
scholars have despaired of creating one, because of the great dialectal, chronological, and free variation of ME. Fisiak (1968: 106) classified ME strong verbs on the
basis of the number of ablaut alternates in the paradigm. For example, cling ∼
clung is bi-alternate in PDE and sing ∼ sang ∼ sung is tri-alternate. Even that arrangement, though, is only a compromise, as even the number of ablaut alternates
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was in flux. During ME, the number of principal parts in strong verb paradigms
was in the process of being reduced, such that OE verbs had four principal parts
and PDE verbs now have only three.
Krygier (1994: 94) observes that not only does the number of ablaut alternates
for a given verb vary over time, dialectal variation existed even in the number of
alternates at a given date in ME, though he follows Fisiak’s classification faute
de mieux. Krygier’s criticism is quite correct; moreover, Fisiak’s classification is
not at all satisfactory for the needs of this model. The reduction of alternates is
in large part an effect of type and token frequency, rather than a separate factor
that influenced the outcome of strong verbs. This effect can be seen precisely in
the case of the highly frequent sing vs. the less frequent cling. Chapter 3 studies
in greater detail the relationship between the number of alternates and frequency,
as well as phonological similarity.
Classifications of PDE strong verbs have been made in PDE grammars such as
Huddleston and Pullum (2002) and Quirk et al. (1985), but these do not include
verbs formerly strong but now weak, and so are not useful for the purposes of this
model.
For this reason, no further attempts are made at directly encoding type frequency counts in the model. Type frequency effects are felt indirectly in that a
hypothesized variable has more explanatory power the more verbs it explains. So,
for example, Chapter 3 argued that it is not only the inherent feature of the CCew
structure, but the fact that it is shared by several verbs, that makes it a salient
characteristic of strong preterites.
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6.2.2
CCew
The CCew structure is the simplest to encode in the model. All verbs beginning
with consonant clusters in ME that inherited strong preterites in <-ew>, namely
crow, grow, throw, flow, blow, glow, and know, as well as those three verbs, fly,
slay, and draw, where the <-ew> preterite spread analogically and took over, are
so marked. Flay and gnaw are not included, because the <-ew> preterite was
never the dominant one. Data on the CCew verbs can be found in Chapter 3.
6.2.3
Vowel Quantity
In Chapter 4, the effects of vowel quantity on strong inflection were seen to have
been operative in ME. Long vowels spread to parts of the paradigm where they did
not arise phonologically, and verbs without long vowels in the preterite were more
likely to become weak. Since that time, many of the long vowels have become
short. For example, all Class VI verbs originally had /o:/ in the preterite, which
the Great Vowel Shift raised to /u:/. In the case of shook, took, forsook, and stood,
a later shortening took place, resulting in PDE /U/. It is no longer possible to
claim that strong verb preterites prefer long vowels. Rather, it is the case that
some paradigms contain artifacts of a former preference for long vowels, and the
absence of strong preterites in some verbs, such as help, is due in part to their lack
of long vowels.
For this reason, it is necessary to mark verbs as possessing long vowels based
on their ME forms, just as verbs were marked for initial consonant clusters based
on their ME forms, leading to the inclusion of know and the exclusion of (h)low.
With the dates having been thus narrowed, there still remain decisions to be made
about the vowel quantity of various verbs.
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Though there is orthographic evidence from spellings such as <soong> that
verbs ending in <ng> underwent Homorganic Cluster Lengthening at least sporadically, the lengthening was undone in cases where it did take place. Such verbs
are treated in Chapter 4 as a major class of exceptions to the general preference
for long vowels. These exceptions are permitted by reason of their type frequency
and phonological similarity, and they are marked as not possessing long vowels in
the model. Verbs where long vowels spread to the preterite from the participle are
so marked, because the ability to spread the vowel is, according to my hypothesis,
a contributing factor to the survival of their strong inflection. Thus, Class IV
and V verbs are marked for long vowels, as are Class III verbs where Homorganic
Cluster Lengthening applied consistently in the present and participle, as in find.
Verbs ending in diphthongs are marked as possessing long vowels. The assignment
of verbs to vowel quantity is laid out in Table 6.2.
Table 6.2: Vowel Quantity
Long
Short
ache, bake, bear, beat, bide, bind, bite, blow, break, brew, brook,
chew, choose, come, creep, crow, draw, drive, eat, find, flay, flow,
fly, fold, freeze, give, glide, glow, gnaw, grave, grind, gripe,
grow, heave, hold, knead, know, lade, laugh, leap, lie (strong),
lie (weak), low, mete, mow, reap, reek, ride, rise, row, sake,
seethe, shake, shave, shear, shine, shoot, shove, shrive, slay, slide,
smite, sneeze, sow, speak, sprout, stand, steal, step, stride, swear,
take, tear, throw, tread,wade, wake, weave, whine, wind, wreak,
writhe, yield
begin, bid, burst, carve, climb, cling, delve, drink, fall, fight,
flee, fling, get, help, hew, hold, let, mourn, run, salt, see, shed,
shit, shrink, sing, sink, sit, sleep, sling, slink, smart, sping,
spring, spurn, starve, stick, sting, stink, strike, swallow, swell,
swim, swing, warp, wash, wax, win, wring
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6.2.4
Labial Stop
Welna (1991: 133) observes that all the OE verbs ending in labial stops are now
weak, listing gripe, reap, creep, sup, climb54 , help, warp, yelp, shape, step, leap,
sleep, sweep, and weep. He writes, “Such consistent behaviour of the above 14
verbs, with no examples of the contrary development, testifies to a special impact
of labials in English, but not in other Germanic languages.”
It is unclear, however, whether the absence of PDE strong verbs ending in
labial stops represents anything more than a coincidence. Chapter 4 attributes
the weak outcome of help, warp, and yelp to the phonetically short vowel of the
strong preterite, which led to high confusability with the weak preterite. Krygier
omits sleep from the strong verbs on the grounds that it was already predominantly
weak in OE. Fertig explains sup with the fact that strong sup coalesced with its
weak counterparts OE suppan and supian, and he explains shape as a verb that
was reanalyzed as a denominal and therefore weak. Fertig also gives yelp as a
possible example of reanalysis as a denominal. Omitting these verbs leaves gripe,
reap, creep, climb, step, leap, sweep, and weep.
Because I can neither offer a principled explanation for why the labial should
have been relevant, nor reject it outright, I mark gripe, reap, creep, climb, step,
leap, sweep, weep, help, warp, and yelp as possessing the feature “labial” and test
the explanatory power of this variable in the model. Because climb lost its final
labial stop circa 1300 (Jordan-Crook 1974: 190)55 , it is necessary to encode this
by first testing the model with climb marked as labial and then test it with climb
not marked as labial. For the same reason, it is necessary to mark climb first as
belonging to Class IIIa, with verbs like cling, and then to have it change class. It
is not entirely clear where to put it. It underwent HCL in the present, but does
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not otherwise inflect like find in PDE. After the verb climb had become weak,
Elizabethan archaists created an unetymological past tense /klo:m/, so I assign
it to Class I, with verbs like gripe, when it is not in Class III. If most of the
explanatory power of the feature “labial” comes from its ability to explain climb,
then changing climb will make a significant difference to the model; otherwise, no
difference will be noticed.
6.3
Results
A data frame in R was created to organize the data in the form of a matrix,
with each row containing the information for an individual verb, and each column
representing a variable. The data frame was named verbs. The column containing
the PDE inflectional outcome was coded using S or W for each verb to represent
strong or weak, and the column was labelled verbs$Outcome. Two columns were
created with the token frequency data, one from the LAEME corpus and one from
CELEX, and these were labelled respectively verbs$LAEME and verbs$CELEX.
The column for vowel quantity records a 1 for a long vowel and a 0 for a short
vowel, and was labelled verbs$Quantity. The column containing the features for
final labial stop and CCew preterite structure record a 1 for verbs with the feature
and 0 for verbs without the feature. They are labelled respectively verbs$Labial
and verbs$CCew. Likewise, membership in Class IIIa is indicated with a 0 or 1,
and a column heading verbs$ClassIIIa. The column containing class membership,
labelled verbs$Class, contains the name of each class, “I”, “II”, etc., and these are
listed as strings rather than numbers, so that the model does not treat them as
ordered in any way. In R, the list of strings is called a factor and is opposed to a
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vector, which is a list of numerals.
The usual method for testing models is to include all the independent variables as the baseline model, remove variables individually, and see if the model
improves or worsens as a result of losing a variable. R operates using input from
the command-line, so the code used to obtain the results is included for maximum
reproducibility. The basic command is given in (1), and the permutations on the
variables are studied in 3.1-3.4.
(1) Code for baseline model
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$CCew + verbs$Class +
verbs$ClassIIIa, family = ‘binomial’))
This means that a generalized linear model creates best-fit lines for the outcome
of the verbs, given the predictive variables, which are separated by a + sign. Upon
carrying out this command, R displays a summary of the results. The code in (1)
obtains for the AIC, which is the figure in which we are interested, a value of
89.159. To this figure will be compared the AIC of all other variants of the model.
6.3.1
Frequency
The first test to be carried out, with the code given in (1), is to ascertain whether
token frequency has predictive power in the model. The expected answer is that
it should very much have predictive power. The second test, with the code given
in (2) and (3), investigates whether the LAEME corpus or the CELEX corpus has
more predictive power than the other, and the third investigates whether we gain
anything from having both in the model, or whether including both is redundant.
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Table 6.3 compares the AIC values for each variant of the model.
(1) No frequency
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial +
verbs$CCew + verbs$Class + verbs$ClassIIIa, family = ‘binomial’))
(2) LAEME only
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$CCew + verbs$Class + verbs$ClassIIIa,
family = ‘binomial’))
(3) CELEX only
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$CCew + verbs$Class + verbs$ClassIIIa,
family = ‘binomial’))
Table 6.3: Frequency Effects
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
No frequency
141.43
LAEME only
100.43
CELEX only
96
LAEME and CELEX (baseline model) 89.16
The difference between a model with token frequency and a model without is
immediately clear, and it is a drastic difference: 89 vs. 141. These figures provide
yet another confirmation of the well-understood correlation between high token
frequency and conservative inflection. Two conclusions are new, however. First,
the AIC values show that using the frequency counts from CELEX provides a
small but significant improvement over those from LAEME. Second, they show
that the frequency effects of LAEME are not all encompassed in CELEX, and that
186
LAEME makes enough of a contribution to be worth including in the model. This
is an argument for using historical corpora in studies of English verbs, something
that it is to be hoped other studies will take more advantage of, especially now
that more and more corpora are being prepared and made available in a searchable
format.
Another test, using a support vector machine, indicates that the difference
between the predictive power of CELEX and LAEME data in that method is not
great enough to be significant. A support vector machine is a method of classification and operates by seeking to maximize the number of correct classifications. In
this case, it maximizes the number of correct weak and correct strong outcomes.
We can use this to compare the ability of CELEX and LAEME frequency data to
predict correctly the outcomes of verbs. The code for carrying out these tests in R,
given that LAEME is column 3 in the matrix and CELEX column 4, is provided
in 1 and 2.
(1) Support vector machine, using LAEME
summary(svm(verbs[,3], verbs$Outcome, cross = 10))
(2) Support vector machine, using CELEX
summary(svm(verbs[,4], verbs$Outcome, cross = 10))
The test is cross-validated ten times, which means that ten times the model
chooses a random data point to leave out of the sample and attempts to predict
it using the remainder of the data. The numbers are given in Table 6.4.
A statistical significance test comparing the two, such as prop.test() in R,
yields a p-value of 1, which shows that the difference between 91 and 92 correct
predictions cannot be distinguished in a statistically significant way from results
obtained from chance. The code for the calculations is given in (1).
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Table 6.4: Classifications by Frequency
LAEME
CELEX
% Correct classifications # Correct classifications
68.94%
91
69.69%
92
(1)Comparison of LAEME and CELEX Performance
prop.test(c(91, 92), c(132, 132))
Thus, in a generalized linear model, CELEX has a slight advantage, but
LAEME is a beneficial addition to the model. When using a support vector
machine to maximize classification of the data, CELEX and LAEME are equally
effective. Which model to use depends on the goal of the research being carried
out: to create an explanatory model for the system as a whole, or to find the criterion that will do the best job of dividing verbs into strong and weak categories.
6.3.2
CCew
It has long gone unnoticed that while the verbs whose preterites end in <-ew>
mostly have high frequency in PDE and those that lost <-ew> preterites have low
frequency in PDE, the relative frequencies in OE and EME are quite different.
Nor can it be assumed a priori that, given a change in frequency over time, the
outcome will always reflect the most recent frequency. For a counterexample,
(for)sake was highly frequent in LAEME, being ranked at 38 out of 132, and is of
low frequency in CELEX, being ranked at 119 out of 132. Yet its PDE preterite
forsook is more in accord with its EME frequency than its PDE frequency.
For this reason, Chapter 3 introduces an additional explanatory factor to ac-
188
count for verbs such as threw and grew, which did not become weak before their
frequency increased, and verbs like mow and sow, which did become weak when
their frequency decreased. This factor was the presence of an initial consonant
cluster. The hypothesis predicted that the model will find the variable CCew to
be important when PDE frequencies are not included. It is not immediately clear
whether this will be the case when PDE frequencies are included.
The code for these tests are given in (1) – (3). (1) tests the model with all
the variables being used, excluding CCew. (2) tests the model when the CELEX
frequencies are omitted but CCew is left in. (3) tests the model when both the
CELEX frequencies and CCew are omitted. The results are presented in Table
6.5.
(1) No CCew
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$Class + verbs$ClassIIIa,
family = ‘binomial’))
(2) No CELEX
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$Class + verbs$CCew + verbs$ClassIIIa,
family = ‘binomial’))
(3) No CELEX or CCew
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$Class + verbs$ClassIIIa, family = ‘binomial’))
When the PDE frequencies from CELEX are included, CCew contributes a
barely perceptible improvement in the model, as the AIC values 89.16 vs 89.98
show. It is probably the case that slew and crew, both of which are infrequent,
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Table 6.5: CCew
baseline model
Without CCew
Without CCew or CELEX
With CCew, without CELEX
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
89.16
89.98
105.75
100.43
persist in part because of their CCew structure. The difference in the AIC values,
even though slight, is all the more significant in that the model is penalized for
every additional variable. Even with this penalty, and with LAEME and CELEX
frequencies, CCew adds explanatory power, even if only to a low degree.
When the CELEX frequencies are omitted from the model, to approximate
an earlier stage of the language, CCew improves the model even more noticeably,
from an AIC of 105.75 down to 100.43. The importance of the consonant cluster
in these verbs is in accord with the fact that all new members of the class in ME
also began with consonant clusters, indicating that the cluster was an important
feature for membership.
It is clear that know, which lost its cluster at approximately the end of ME
(Minkova 2003), remains strong because of its very high frequency. To support the
idea that CCew is diminishing in its power to offset low frequency and preserve
strong inflection, we find that crew is vanishing among English speakers in favor
of crowed. Slew, which is also partly explained by its high frequency in earlier
periods before it was replaced by killed, is beginning the process as well. Merriam
Webster records slew as the default preterite, but notes that slayed is used as well,
especially in the sense “to delight or amuse immensely.”
190
6.3.3
Class vs. Class3a
As has been noted, class membership is another feature that varies so much and
changes so quickly that it is difficult to represent in a single model. The only
tests here are whether OE class membership, which is the easiest to define, contributes anything to the model, and whether it contributes anything in addition
to membership in Class IIIa, the sing ∼ sang ∼ sung verbs. The code is given in
(1) – (3), with (1) having no class membership at all, (2) having membership in
ClassIIIa, and (3) containing the general assignment of each verb to an OE class.
The results are summarized in Table 6.6.
(1) No class membership
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$CCew, family = ‘binomial’))
(2) Class IIIa membership
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$ClassIIIa + verbs$CCew,
family = ‘binomial’))
(3) Overall class membership
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$Class + verbs\$CCew,
family = ‘binomial’))
From the great difference between 125.37 and 89.16 in Table 6.6, it can be seen
that class membership does play a role. This is to be expected. What was not
apparent before the fact was that OE class membership, as a whole, is a slightly
poorer predictor of outcome than the simple prediction that Class IIIa verbs will
191
Table 6.6: Class Membership
No class membership
Class only
Class IIIa only
Class and Class IIIa (baseline model)
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
125.37
87.16
86.18
89.16
be strong. This is not to suggest that other classes and subclasses do not behave
consistently. In fact, small increments of improvement in the AIC are obtained
by adding Class IIIb—which has also consistently strong outcomes in bind, find,
grind, wind, and could have been left united with Class IIIa, despite no longer
inflecting alike—Class I, Class IV, and Class V. The effect of adding these classes
to the model is shown in Table 6.7.
(1) Individual Class Membership
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME +
verbs$Quantity + verbs$Labial + verbs$CCew + verbs$Class3a +
verbs$Class3b + verbs$Class1 + verbs$Class4 + verbs$Class5,
family = ‘binomial’))
Table 6.7: Individual Class Membership
No class membership
Class only
Class IIIa only
Classes I, IIIa, IIIb, IV, V
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
125.37
87.16
86.18
78.81
Outside of classes I, IIIa, IIIb, IV, and V, class membership does not correlate
with inflectional outcome such that the model is improved. One may observe
192
that Classes I, IV, and V came to share the /O:/ preterites that speakers favored
wherever possible. The increased survival rate of these verbs suggests that /O:/
was not only favored in selection from among ablaut variants, but also may have
favored verbs to remain strong rather than become weak. Against this hypothesis,
however, it should be noted that Class II, which also shares the /O:/, is not at all
conservative. Of 13 members, only choose and freeze, retained strong inflection.
See Chapter 2 for further detail on the behavior of individual classes.
6.3.4
Quantity
In Chapter 4, it was hypothesized that long vowels were generated in place of
short wherever possible in strong preterites, that short vowels were not generated
in place of long vowels except before dentals, and that where no long vowels were
possible, the strong preterite was more likely to disappear in favor of the weak
preterite, except in Class IIIa, the sing ∼ sang ∼ sung verbs. Using the model,
(1) tests the effects of removing vowel quantity from the model and Table 6.8
compares the results to the baseline model.
(1) Vowel Quantity
summary(glm(verbs\$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$Class I + verbs$ClassIIIa + verbs$ClassIV +
verbs$ClassV, family = ‘binomial’))
Table 6.8: Vowel Quantity
baseline model
without Quantity
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
78.81
80.42
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Table 6.8 shows that the model worsens, from an AIC of 78.81 to 80.42, when
quantity is removed, suggesting that quantity played a role in the survival or loss
of strong inflection.
6.3.5
Labial-final Stems
To test Welna’s hypothesis that the verbs with a final labial stop are more likely
to become weak than other verbs, the baseline model is compared with the model
when the variable verbs$Labial is removed. Then, because climb had lost its labial
stop by about 1300 (Jordan-Crook 1974: 190), the baseline model and the model
without verbs$Labial are revised so as to remove the feature labial is removed from
climb and its class membership is moved from IIIa to I. The code for these tests
is given in (1)-(4), and the AIC values are presented in Table 6.9.
(1) Baseline model (with ‘climb’ labial)
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$CRew + verbs$Class3a + verbs$Class3b +
verbs$Class1 + verbs$Class4 + verbs$Class5, family = ‘binomial’))
(2) Baseline minus labial (with ‘climb’ labial)
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$CRew + verbs$Class3a + verbs$Class3b + verbs$Class1 +
verbs$Class4 + verbs$Class5, family = ‘binomial’))
(3) Baseline model without ‘climb’
summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$Labial + verbs$CRew + verbs$Class3a + verbs$Class3b +
verbs$Class1 + verbs$Class4 + verbs$Class5, family = ‘binomial’))
(4) Baseline minus labial without ‘climb’
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summary(glm(verbs$Outcome ~ verbs$CELEX + verbs$LAEME + verbs$Quantity +
verbs$CRew + verbs$Class3a + verbs$Class3b + verbs$Class1 +
verbs$Class4 + verbs$Class5, family = ‘binomial’))
Table 6.9: Climb
baseline model (with climb)
without labial (with climb)
baseline model (without climb)
without labial (without climb)
Akaike Information Criteron (AIC)
78.81
98.07
79.56
89.68
The difference between the baseline models and the models without the variable
Labial in Table 9 suggests that the presence of a final labial stop correlated with
a tendency to become weak. The great difference between the models with and
without climb marked as labial implies that the labial stop would make a good
explanatory factor for the weak outcome of climb, if it were not for the chronology.
Lacking a functional explanation for why the final labial should have been relevant,
I assume by default that distributional factors were at work. Should a plausible
functional explanation be proposed, the data and the results of this model would
have to be reanalyzed. Because climb both lost its strong preterite and its labial
stop before any of the other verbs ending in a labial stop became weak, it is
implausible that climb became weak as a result of pressure from other verbs. No
other strong verbs end in /aim/. However, verbs such as sweep, weep, creep, and
leap may have been drawn into the weak category by analogy with verbs such as
sleep and keep.
If several verbs ending in /p/ came to have weak /ept/ preterites by analogy
with existing /ept/ preterites, in addition to the weakening of help, warp, and
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yelp based on their short vowel, an island of reliability may have arisen in the
grammar. The island of reliability would make verbs such as step more likely to
lose their strong inflection.
6.4
Conclusions
The model presented in this chapter provides additional confirmation for the role
of vowel quantity in the survival of strong inflection, and for the role of the initial
consonant cluster in <-ew> preterites at an earlier stage in the language. OE
class membership has predictive power for classes I, IIIa, IIIb, IV, and V, but the
overall effect of attempting to use class membership on the model is less powerful
than simply classifying verbs according to whether or not they belong to the sing
∼ sang ∼ sung family. There is evidence that the feature of final labial stop has
predictive power above and beyond the other factors and is worth investigating
further.
6.5
Further Research
What has been presented in this dissertation is an exploration of factors that were
relevant to the history of the verbs that were originally strong in OE. Yet it is
obvious that these strong verbs did not exist in a vacuum in the grammar; rather,
their behavior is inextricable from interactions with the weak verbs. Studying the
originally weak verbs would thus be appropriate for further work on the subject.
One obstacle of studying the weak verbs is that they outnumbered the strong
verbs, at least in OE and EME, by a ratio of 3:1, and this ratio increased over
time. Doing a comprehensive study of each verb is thus less practical. For this
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reason, many of the resources that exist for strong verbs, including such simple
things as a list of each OE strong verb, do not have counterparts for the weak
verbs. It would thus be useful to go through Bosworth and Toller’s OE dictionary
and compile a list of all the weak verbs. It would then be practical to take a
random sampling and conduct research on that, instead of on the entire set.
One important factor in the history of strong verbs that scholars agree on
(Welna; Krygier; Fertig) is that nearly every OE strong verb had a corresponding
derived weak counterpart. In many cases, the strong and weak counterparts fell
together, producing a weak verb with the semantics of both the original verbs,
while in other cases they did not. At present we do not have an explanation
for which fell together and which did not (Krygier 1994: 20-21). The place to
begin would be with relative frequency counts of the strong verbs vis-à-vis their
counterparts. The corpora exist, as now do the frequency counts for the strong
verbs, so gathering the frequencies for the weak verbs is the next straightforward
step. When the extent of the effects of frequency are identified, semantic similarity
should be considered.
Phonological similarity exists among unrelated verbs as well. Albright and
Hayes (2003) have shown that the phonological structure of weak verbs is analyzed
in the same way as with strong verbs. The fact that verbs with certain phonological
structures are more reliably weak than verbs with other structures is recorded in
speakers’ grammars and taken into account when generating the past tenses of
new verbs. For example, all English verbs that end in voiceless fricatives are
weak, so a new verb ending in a voiceless fricative is more likely to be weak than
a verb ending in a voiced fricative. Albright and Hayes give the name “islands of
reliability” to these phonological structures for which inflection can be predicted
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with a greater than usual confidence.
For this reason, a full study of the English verb system would take into account
structures that are shared by both strong and weak verbs. The structure CCew,
for example, is a common strong preterite, but there are many weak verbs, such
as slow, that could participate, but don’t. The interaction of weak verbs such as
slow with strong verbs such as grow should be investigated.
The effects of changes of token frequency over time have been investigated, and
they have been found to be restricted but recognizable. For type frequency, the
relative number of weak vs. strong verbs was touched upon in Chapter 5. There, it
was noted that the “shift”, or, more accurately, the increase in instability, is often
attributed to a rise in the number of weak verbs, due to borrowing from French.
The calculations in Chapter 5 do not support this hypothesis. However, since that
time, there has been an influx of borrowings from French, Latin, and Greek, such
that the current ratio of strong to weak verbs is even lower than the 3:1 ratio of
OE and EME. Using a list of 4595 past tense forms from CELEX, which counts
participles and preterites separately when these are not homophonous, a search
for forms ending in <-ed> yields 4234 hits. The remaining 361 forms are strong
or suppletive, or add the weak suffix but do so irregularly, such as said, bought,
kept, burnt. The proportion of perfectly regular types, then, is at least 92%. Most
of these items are low-frequency verbs belonging to an educated register, and it
should be investigated whether this increased imbalance in weak/strong inflection
has created additional pressure for strong verbs to become weak.
For a full study of the English verb system, the formal model should be made
more complex. The present model, for the sake of simplification, considers only
strong verbs as input to the system, and as output whether they become weak or
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remain strong. A strong verb that changed class, such as fly, which acquired the
past tense flew by analogy, is treated no differently than a strong verb that retains
its inherited preterite, such as drive. Weak verbs also either remained weak or
entered various strong classes, and the existence of two weak suffixes, evident in
wanted and put, complicates matters even further. In order to contend with this
level of complexity, the model should employ multilinear logistic regression. Unlike
binary logistic regression, which allows only two outcomes, in our case strong or
weak, multilinear regression would permit each strong class and each of the weak
suffixes to be a separate possible outcome.
The analysis would benefit from an examination of more measures of goodnessof-fit beyond the AIC value, such as the p-values for the coefficients of the variables. Testing for interactions of variables could be done in a more rigorous way
by specifically encoding variable interaction in the model rather than by impressionistically noting when the AIC value seems to indicate that the significance of
one variable is dependent on another.56
In addition, the goal of the model was to test the explanatory power of the
hypothesized factors such as vowel quantity. A more thorough approach might
take the form of a learning model, with verb preterites generated over multiple
generations and the possibility of making changes to the data. This approach
would be in better accord with the diachronic nature of the history of English
verbs.
Notes
1
I am grateful to Donka Minkova for sharing with me a pre-publication draft of the grammar.
2
See especially Bybee (2001) and the collected articles in Bybee (2007).
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3
See Zuraw (2003) for discussion.
4
To tell untruths. Lie meaning ‘to assume a recumbent position’ was a Class V verb, licgan.
5
LAEME does not distinguish between brinnan and bærnan, so this number includes counts
for both.
6
In PDE only in the prefixed form engrave.
7
Rare in PDE.
8
Here I include both forsake and any other forms, prefixed or unprefixed, belonging to this
root. Already in LAEME forsake predominates 150 hits to 3.
9
10
SumT 1704 “But natheles, for fere yet he quook”
Though smite did not decline in frequency steadily after OE, but rather enjoyed a period of
increase before decreasing, it is employed because I found no examples of steady decrease. The
corpora prohibited the investigation of many verbs due to pernicious homophony with other
forms, so this absence of any verbs with a steady decline should not be taken as a definitive
statement about the entire system, but rather as an area meriting further research.
11
As an illustration of the fact that a word-final dental stop is prone to be interpreted as the
preterite morpheme, consider the word linguished, which arose from a misinterpretation of the
word linguist as a past participle of a back-formed linguish (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)).
12
This date is especially difficult to obtain with confidence, because the spelling <o> in the
preterite is ambiguous. It may represent the rounded allomorph of /a/ that occurred before
a nasal in the West Midlands, in other words the inherited preterite. Alternatively, it may
represent a common ME orthography for /u/, in other words the grade leveled from the past
participle. Only the orthography <ung> can therefore be relied upon. What this means is
the pronunciation /2ng/ may have been in place earlier than the dates in the following tables
indicate, but have been obscured by the orthography.
13
Unlike Bybee and Moder, I do not include come ∼ came ∼ come, due to the difference of
the PDE vowel in the preterite singular.
14
MED citation: c1540(?a1400) Destr.Troy (Htrn 388)8843: Alphenor the fuerse flung he to
dethe
15
For details on this history of hang and its various dialectal forms, see the OED entry.
16
At least in some dialects and meanings.
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17
E.g the Cursor Mundi, a northern text, rhymes draw and know in “þair watur at þis well to
drau, / þar sal i mi womman knau” (3277-78).
18
Earlier in other dialects. Watson (1946) argues that in Northumbrian, a merger of eo and
ea had taken place already in OE.
19
Stockwell and Minkova (1992: 199) list guild, build, meld, and seldom as exceptions that
survive in PDE. Of those, guild and build have orthographic indications of lengthening earlier
in their history, and seldom does not meet their criteria for the environment that triggered
lengthening; namely, the -l- and -d- are heterosyllabic.
20
I use sprang for the example to exclude the suggestion that competition with the noun song
might have been the reason sang was chosen as the preterite. This argument would not apply
to 13 of the 15 verbs in question. Only song and strong (past tense of string) would have been
homophonous with a noun or adjective.
21
(c1387-95) Chaucer CT.Prol.(Manly-Rickert) A.672: “Ful loude he soong [vr. songe], ‘com
hider loue to me.’ ”
22
This leveling was part of a more general ME reduction of inflection across noun and verb
paradigms, a tendency that can be described but has not fully been accounted for. Language
contact with French and Scandinavian may have played a role, but simultaneous phonological
and morphological reduction form a notorious chicken-and-egg dilemma.
23
The Class I verbs used by Long, whose methodology and principles of inclusion differ from
the present work’s, are bide, bite, chide, cleave, drive, flite, glide, ride, rise, rive, shine, shrive,
slide, smite, stride, strike, strive, sty, thrive, wite, write, writhe.
24
See Long (1944: 38) for textual citations of fifteenth-century occurrences.
25
Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle p. 14 lines 11-12: He toke leue at Charles, & com tille þis lond,
/ Among his riche kynde gode frendes he fond.
26
Northern only.
27
Northern only.
28
One possible example.
29
Different dialects, of course, made different selections from among the various possibilities.
I am interested here primarily in the history of the standard PDE dialect.
30
“I never writ, nor no man ever loved” (Shakes. Sonnet 116).
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31
Later diphthongized, of course, by the Great Vowel Shift.
32
Verbs with idential presents and preterites do exist in English, of course, all ending in dentals,
such as put.
33
Thanks are due David Fertig for helping develop the details of this account in an exchange
of personal communications.
34
A dialectal variant of <d/tode>.
35
The current form lend is the result of backformation from the preterite lende.
36
The mechanisms by which these dispreferred sequences are avoided continue to be debated,
though the fact of avoidance has been well-established since at least Brugmann (1909: 1975). In
the morphological camp, hypotheses such as affix-checking (Menn and MacWhinney 1984) and
vacuous rule application (Stemberger 1981) have been proposed. In the phonological camp, the
OCP is used to explain all “morphological” haplology, which is taken to be not morphological
at all (Plag 1998). The reasons behind the limited production of the syllabic morphemes –es
and –ed by very young English-speaking children are also debated. Berko (1958) concludes that
children acquire the syllabic plural and preterite allomorphs -ed and -es later than the other
allomorphs. Bybee and Slobin (1982) conclude instead that children begin with a schematic
analysis that looks only at the final shape of the preterite, and gradually start to extend the
suffixation process and restrict the schematic analysis. Because the preschoolers they tested
favored verbs without an overt suffix, and the third-graders and adults favored verbs with the
overt suffix, they argue that this has implications for language change. The locus of language
change is commonly believed to be in the speech of small children, and this is often the case. In
these verbs, however, children “change their mind” as they grow older, and they produce a great
number of overtly suffixed forms. As a result, the overtly suffixed forms are the default in the
language, and Bybee and Slobin predict that the direction of inflectional change will be toward
more overtly suffixed forms. Wedded and wetted are predicted to win out over wed and wet, if
this trend continues.
37
Considering only morphology here, and not phonological changes such as failure to reproduce
the vowel precisely, failure to pronounce the initial cluster, glottalization of the final /t/, etc.
38
“Accoutred as I was, I plunged in.” (Julius Caesar, 1.2.113)
39
The two forms have now been separated according to meaning and pronunciation, with putt
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and putted limited to golf in the standard dialect. See the Oxford English Dictionary (OED s.v.
put) for the dialectal distribution.
40
And Latin. It is at times impossible to determine which is the immediate source of a
word, and for our purposes it does not matter, as French and Latin loanwords are alike in being
predominantly di- and polysyllabic.
41
cost, grant, hurt, part ‘depart’, quit, rest, roast, void
42
anoint, circumcide, command, consecrate, convict, dispute, profit, provide, record, repent,
translate, visit
43
The forms <wante> and <want> are marked by the MED (s.v. wanten) as possible scribal
errors. If so, the average for this column should be even lower.
44
“Beat, the preterimperfect tense, is frequently pronounced in Ireland like bet (a wager), and
if utility were the only object of language, this would certainly be the preferable pronunciation,
as nothing tends more to obscurity than words which have no different forms for their present
and past times (italics DM); but fashion in this, as in many other cases, triumphs over use and
propriety; and bet, for the past time and participle of beat, must be religiously avoided.” Walker
(1791). Discussed in Minkova (2009: 335).
45
Beat might have been expected to shorten in the present, like sweat and other cases of /E:/
before a dental, and the preterite should have followed suit, resulting in a no-change verb with
a short vowel followed by a dental. Yet it did not shorten. This I am at a loss to explain and
must attribute to random chance. All instances of the preterite in the Linguistic Atlas of Early
Middle English (LAEME) seem to have a short vowel.
The shortening of let, on the other hand, is presented by the OED as not yet satisfactorily
explained. I adduce sweat, from swǣtan, as a parallel for the shortening of the vowel in the
present tense lǣtan. The shortening of the vowel in the preterite lēt may derive from the
product-oriented schema, where short vowels are preferred before dentals. Of all the no-change,
only beat is long, and Walker shows that it was shortened at least in Ireland. The fact that beat
was not shortened in the standard dialect is more surprising than the fact that let was shortened.
Confusion with the weak verb lettan ’hinder’ may also have been a factor; for a parallel, see the
confusion between cleave ’adhere’ and cleave ’split’ discussed in Chapter 2.
46
“I say, isn’t bread ‘riz’ enough when it runs over the pans?” (Little Women, Chapter 11)
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47
Including 7 that have since suffered lexical loss.
48
Further breakdown: 5 with strong weak variation, e.g. shear, crow; 8 with weak past and
both weak and strong participles, e.g. sow, hew; 6 with vowel change and dental suffix, e.g.
creep, sleep; 1 (burnt) with irregular suffix –t and no vowel change; 3 synchronically strong:
read, slide, shoot; 5 no-change e.g. let, shed.
49
Including 17 that have since suffered lexical loss.
50
“A little less than three quarters” (Quirk and Wrenn 1957: 40).
51
I thank David Fertig for bringing this passage and its relevance to the ME strong verbs to
my attention.
52
I thank David Diez, doctoral candidate and then graduate of the UCLA Department of
Statistics while he worked with me, for giving me directions for carrying out the logistic analysis.
Ingo Plag offered a number of further suggestions for which I am grateful, though I unfortunately
did not receive them until shortly before filing the dissertation and was able only to incorporate
them into the dicussion of further work on more sophisticated models.
53
See Baayen (2008) on logistic models, their implementation in R, and their use in linguistics.
54
The status of the labial stop in climb is a matter of discussion in Section 3.5
55
Note also the OE form climman, indicating that the stop was no longer always present as
early as OE.
56
I thank Ingo Plag for pointing out that parsimony is not of concern in a regression model
and that it is preferable to include even variables previously determined to be insignificant when
testing for the significance of one given variable.
204