Download Participle Levelling in American English: impoverishment and

Participle Levelling in American English: impoverishment and syntactic differentiation
Introduction The so-called ‘standard’ English verbal system is mostly regular, in that for most
verbs, the past participle forms (i.e., those found in the context of the auxiliary verbs have and
passive be) are identical to the preterite. However, among the irregular verbs, there is a class of
verbs which use some form of –en in the participle form (along with possibly some stem readjustment rule), and a subset of the zero forms which use a different stem vowel. Examples of these are
ate/eaten and drank/drunk.
In this paper we provide experimental evidence from spoken acceptability judgement tasks of
levelling of these participles in American English. The levelling is a variable phenomenon, and
leads to the introduction of morphological doublets into the grammar of speakers who level. Our
data shows that speakers judged levelled forms differentially depending the syntactic environment
of the participle. Levelling is judged to be possible in contexts where the auxiliary have can be
realized as of (Kayne 1997; Munn and Tortora 2014). Corpus data collected from Twitter (Bybel
2014) matches well with the experimental facts. We propose an analysis of the levelling facts based
on impoverishment, following Nevins and Parrott (2010) although we do not adopt their variable
rules schema.
Patterns of levelling It has long been noticed (at least as far back as Mencken (1923)) that levelling of the participle in these verbs occurs, i.e., the form of the participle becomes identical to
the form of the preterite. This means that for some speakers, the /–en/ forms are either missing or
vary with the standard forms to some degree. Thus alongside John could have eaten more we have
examples like John could have ate more.
The levelled forms are considered to be non-standard and are found in most, if not all varieties of
English including British English (Cheshire 1982; Sampson 2002; Smith 2004), Australian English
(Eisikovits 1987) and American English (Bloomer 2002; Mencken 1923; Wolfram and Christian
1976). To the extent that these studies address the issue of the ‘standardness‘ of the levelling, there
is agreement that the levelled form is the non-standard.
Experimental design We used a spoken acceptability judgement task to assess speakers ratings
of levelled and unlevelled participles in four grammatical conditions: perfect+modal, present perfect, infinitival perfect and past perfect. In each case we compared the perfect participle judgements
with passive participle judgements, which informal judgements with local speakers confirmed were
not acceptable when levelled. We report data here from three conditions; we are still collecting data
from the fourth. Since ratings of variable phenomena tend to be contrastive when combined in the
same set of materials, we used a between subjects design: different groups of participants received
either levelled or unlevelled participles; each group heard sentences from only one condition. There
were 20 experimental sentences in each set (10 passives and 10 participles) along with 50 filler sentences (30 grammatical and 20 ungrammatical) which served as controls. Sentences were recorded
by a local native speaker, and presented in random order (same order for each participant). Participants (undergraduates at a large midwestern American university) heard each sentence once with
approximately 5 seconds between each, and were asked to judge the sentences on a scale of 1–5.
Examples of the experimental sentences are given below.
Sentence
Condition
I could’ve drunk/drank more, but I had an interview the next day. Modal+perfect
Gerald has drunk/drank orange juice for breakfast twice this week. Present perfect
She needs to have drank all her water before she can take her pills. Infinitival perfect
The party ended before all the beer was drunk/drank.
Passive
Results Ratings for the control sentences are shown in Figure 1. As expected, participants gave
grammatical controls big ratings, and ungrammatical controls low ratings. The results for the experimental sentences are shown in Figure 2. ANOVAs were run on the data comparing the Perfect
and Passive conditions in each of the three syntactic conditions. In all three syntactic conditions
there was a significant main effect of levelling: levelled sentences were rated lower than unlevelled
sentences. There were also significant main effects of sentence type. In the Modal and Present perfect conditions, perfects were rated higher than passives. This pattern reversed in the Infinitival
perfect condition, which is to be expected given the relative complexity of those sentences. Importantly, however, in both the Infinitival and Modal perfect contexts there was a significant interaction
between levelling and sentence type: levelling was relatively better in the perfect conditions compared the the passive conditions. No such interaction was found in the present perfect condition.
Inf
5
Modal
Present
Inf
Modal
Present
5
4
Form
Levelled
3
Unlevelled
MeanRating
MeanRating
4
Form
Levelled
3
Unlevelled
2
2
1
1
Gram
UnGram
Gram
UnGram
Gram
UnGram
SentenceType
Figure 1: Ratings of control sentences
Passive Perfect
Passive Perfect
Passive Perfect
SentenceType
Figure 2: Ratings of experimental sentences
Discussion Our data show a pattern in which the levelling of the participle is sensitive to the
syntactic context of the auxiliary. The contexts in which the levelling is permitted by our speakers
is exactly those in which the auxiliary have can be realized as of (Kayne 1997; Munn and Tortora
2014). Adopting for concreteness the analysis of the English verbals system given in Halle and
Marantz (1993) (but see Tortora et al. (2013) for a more radical view) we proposal a variable rule
analysis in which levelling speakers impoverish the feature Participle in the context of auxiliary of.
Analysis of Twitter data by Bybel (2014) provides further support for this analysis. A a sample of
over 5000 levelled participles culled from over 4 million tweets, Bybel finds that levelling occurs
overwhelmingly in the same contexts.
Selected References Bybel, K. 2014. “Maybe I shoulda went to work today”: participle leveling
in American English. ms. Michigan State University. Halle, M. and A. Marantz. 1993. Distributed
Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection. In: The View from Building 20. Ed. by K. Hale and S. J.
Keyser. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Pp. 111–176. Kayne, R. S. 1997. The English
complementizer of. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1. 43–54. Munn, A. and C.
Tortora. 2014. Towards a theory of variation in English participial verb forms: the relevance of
auxiliary morpho-syntax. ms. Michigan State University and CUNY. Nevins, A. and J. Parrott.
2010. Variable rules meet Impoverishment theory: Patterns of agreement leveling in English varieties. Lingua 120. 1135–1159. Tortora, C. et al. Sept. 2013. Variation in Appalachian verb forms:
evidence for a general past. Paper presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Linguistics
of Contemporary English, Austin TX.