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Variation in Appalachian non-present verb forms
Christina Tortora1,2, Frances Blanchette2, Teresa O’Neill2, & Steven Arriaga1
City University of New York (1College of Staten Island; 2The Graduate Center)
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
1. Overview. For many non-regular verbs, Standardized Englishes exhibit two distinct forms for
the “past” vs. the “past participle” (call these non-present forms), for simple past vs. compound
tense contexts (e.g., They drank vs. They’ve drunk). Although this is the pattern claimed to be
exhibited by speakers of Standard English, it does not follow that wherever English speakers
exhibit two non-present forms related to a single verb root (e.g. drank and drunk), that the two
forms should reflect specialization for simple past vs. compound tense. Related to this, it also
doesn’t follow that when speakers exhibit more than one non-present form, there are only two.
Previous research on variation in non-present verb forms in English (e.g. Anderwald 2009;
Eisikovits 1987; Bybee & Moder 1983) characterizes variation exhibited by speakers from
Britain, Australia, and the U.S. as a “levelling” of the past and the participle. These studies
nevertheless assume that speakers mentally represent “past” and “participle” as distinct
categories, following a model where speaker-knowledge is organized around three-part
paradigms, like give–gave–given. Other authors, who describe such variation in the U.S. (e.g.
Labov et al. 1968, Wolfram & Fasold 1974, and Green 2002), consider the possibility of a
collapse to a general past (already seemingly exhibited with regular forms like walked), without
making any claims regarding how this implicates the concepts of “past” vs. “participle.”
2. Appalachian English. In this talk, we continue in the tradition of Labov, Wolfram & Fasold,
and Green, arguing in support of the idea that at least some English grammars exhibit a collapse
of the categories “past” and “participle.” Our study contributes to the understanding of this
collapse by examining novel data from the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian
English (AAPCAppE). Specifically, we examine data from a ~200,000-word sub-portion of the
AAPCAppE which suggest that, for all verbs exhibiting distinct forms in non-present contexts
(e.g. saw/seen), there is no evidence for specialization of a particular form for simple past vs.
compound tense. We thus challenge the validity of the idea that all English speakers mentally
represent two distinct categories, “past” vs. “past participle.”
To understand the distribution of these distinct (or, variant) non-present forms, we do not
begin by assuming they reflect the binary distinction past vs. participle — especially since in
many cases, a verb (e.g., see) is associated with more than two non-present forms (saw/seen/seed
or saw/seen/seened). Instead, we test the following hypothesis: Wherever speakers exhibit more
than one non-present form of a particular verb (e.g. go/went; seen/seed/saw; etc.), no one form
specializes for one syntactic context (simple past) vs. the other (compound tense).
3. Predictions of hypothesis. The predictions of this hypothesis are borne out: our study shows
that for all verbs exhibiting distinct forms in non-present contexts in this sub-portion of the
AAPCAppE, there is no evidence for specialization of a particular form for simple past vs.
compound tense. Here we review the data for ~110,000 words from 5 speakers from the Dante
Oral History Project (a sub-corpus of the AAPCAppE). We found (a) that all speakers had
variant types; (b) that variants occurred more in past than in compound tense contexts, reflecting
the fact that the corpus data contains more past than compound tenses overall; and (c) that all
speakers displayed variant forms that occurred in both past and compound tense contexts.
To answer the question of whether the relative frequency of a given variant (e.g. saw) within
a set (e.g. saw/seen/seed) is similar in past and compound tense contexts, we tallied the number
of tokens of each variant in a set in each non-present environment, with the following results:
2
Total tokens
Tokens of most frequent
variant of each set
(aggregated)
Tokens of less frequent
variant(s) of each set
(aggregated)
All nonpresent
Past
Compound
Tense
1310
1215 (93%)
1226 (95%)
1150 (94%)
84 (5%)
65 (77%)
95 (7%)
76 (6%)
19 (23%)
To summarize: (a) Non-present co-variants occur with different frequencies (93% vs. 7%); (b)
Past has higher frequency than compound tense (95% vs. 5%); (c) However, the relative
frequency of a given co-variant is similar across all non-present environments (e.g.,
94%~77%,); (d) Therefore, it is not the case that syntactic environment (past vs. compound
tense) conditions the relative frequency of co-variants. (Note: the traditional past-participle
paradigm hypothesis would predict a distribution of 95%~5%, but our data do not support this.)
Thus: in our small dataset, co-variants are not specialized for simple past vs. compound tense.
4. Implications and future research. The fact that speakers exhibit variation in the forms used
with the simple past / compound tenses (e.g., They saw ~ They seen and They’ve saw ~ They’ve
seen) may reflect the otherwise commonly accepted idea that speakers allow for equivalent
variants in both contexts — i.e., “morphological doublets” (consider the more normative
variation found with They dreamed ~ They dreamt and They’ve dreamed ~ They’ve dreamt).
However, there are many open questions, including: (a) While the AAPCAppE reveals that
these speakers do not specialize the distinct forms for simple past vs. compound tense, we thus
far have no evidence that the forms don’t specialize for other kinds of distinctions (rendering a
true “morphological doublet” analysis untenable); (b) Given that an individual speaker does not
produce more than 30,000 words in a single interview, analysis of intra-speaker variation is
limited by the limited number of words per speaker; (c) if there truly is a collapse to a general
past, the implications of this collapse for the syntax of past vs. participle must be explored.
Additionally: this study suggests that when a learner is faced with variation in non-present
forms in the different syntactic contexts (past and compound tense), the hypothesis space may be
such that a circumscribed set of possibilities is entertained, as follows: (a) the distinction found
in Standard English (i.e., the distinct forms give rise to a distinction between past vs. participle);
(b) the pattern found with the AAPCAppE speakers (morphological doublets across syntactic
contexts); (c) a distinction found in recent work by Munn & Tortora (2014), whereby speakers
specialize the distinct forms along the lines of realis (I’ve seen that movie three times) vs.
irrealis (I should’ve saw that movie). Our claim that learners entertain these different hypotheses
when faced with variation in use of non-present forms also calls for research in L1 acquisition.
References: Anderwald, L. 2009. The morphology of English Dialects. Word formation in nonstandard English. Cambridge: CUP; Bybee, J. & C. Moder. 1983. “Morphological classes as
natural categories,” Language 59.2: 251-270; Eisikovits, E. 1987. “Variation in the lexical verb
in Inner Sydney English,” Australian Journal of Linguistics 7:1-24; Green, L. 2002. African
American English: A Linguistic Introduction. CUP; Labov, W. et al. 1968. A study of the
nonstandard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City; Munn, A. & C.
Tortora. 2014. Towards a theory of variation in English participial verb forms: the relevance of
auxiliary morpho-syntax. Ms., MSU & CUNY; Tortora, C., B. Santorini, & F. Blanchette. in
progress. The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English; Wolfram, W. & R.
Fasold. 1974. The Study of Social Dialects in American English. NJ: Prentice-Hall.