Lecture 1. Intro Language & Linguistics

Lang Acq Class Lectures CSUN~Linguistics/joseph galasso 'mommy sock' (possessive {'s} is deleted: 'mommy's sock') Commission: 'my's car' (erroneously add possessive {'s} ('my car'). 'I wented home' (erroneously added past tense{ed} on an irregular verb)

Weak verbs in Modern English are sometimes mistakenly identifi ed with regular verbs. Although most weak verbs are indeed regular, there remain some which belong to the irregular group, for example spend, put, make, burn. Apart from drawing a clearer distinction between strong and weak verbs in relation to the regular and irregular division, the aim of this paper is to explain where the irregularity of these irregular weak verbs comes from and to gather possible relicts still present in Modern English. The paper discusses 56 such irregular weak verbs without vowel alternations and 9 archaisms preserving traces of such infl ection. The 56 irregular weak verbs are divided into groups according to the patterns they display and they are additionally marked depending on whether: (1) they have less common irregular preterite and past participle forms, which can be labelled as "literary" or "poetic," (2) they are literary themselves, (3) they have irregular preterite and past participle forms chiefl y in North American English, (4) they have regular variants. The initial plan included all irregular verbs but the extent of the problem coupled with the editorial limitations as to the size of the paper led to the following decisions: fi rst, to exclude the irregular strong verbs and save them for later analyses, and then, in the remaining irregular weak ones, to remove all those with vowel alternations (like keep, seek, lose, say) and to concentrate on the verbs without vowel alternations (investigated in the present paper). It is hoped that the aims of this paper as well as their realization can serve to make the content of the historical grammar course more meaningful to students by linking it to the problems present in Modern English and to the why-questions related to the subject of their studies.

1987

ED281369 - Syntactic and Morphological Errors of English Speakers on the Spanish Past Tenses.

2004

Ponghyung Lee (2018), Frequency Effects on the English Past Tense Morphology. Studies in Linguistics 48, 25-43. This paper is to address the roles of token and type frequencies of English past tense forms in the course of deciding their productivity and regularisation. Our findings for the first issue come to the claim that both token and type frequencies significantly contribute to increasing their productivity. When it comes to the controversial issue related to the tie of one's token frequency to its productivity, our position is borne out by the tallies earned from fine-grained investigations into high, medium and low frequency tokens. Our analyses stand out by engaging in an exhaustive examination of the Brown Corpus, in contrast to the arbitrary sampling methods tried by the previous literature like Bybee and Moder 1983, Moder 1992. On the contrary, token and type frequencies prove to be insignificant to regularisation of the irregularity, leaving the impression that the frequency of a certain word makes a negative and, at most, weak impact on regularisation. The opposite results between productivity and regularisation with respect to token/type frequencies awaken us to the contention that multiple factors are bound up with English past tense morphology. (Daejeon University) ______________________________ * Many thanks to three anonymous referees of SL. Certainly, I alone am responsible for the views and descriptions shown here.

In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced in Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016). Constructional contamination bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse of the utterances they interpret, but instead often rely on ‘shallow parsing’ and the storage of large, unanalyzed chunks of language in memory, as proposed in Ferreira, Bailey and Ferraro (2002), Ferreira and Patson (2007) and Dąbrowska (2014). Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016) investigated a single case study in depth, namely the Dutch partitive genitive. This case study is reviewed, and three new case studies are added, namely the competition between long and bare infinitives, word order variation in verbal clusters, and preterite formation. We find evidence of constructional contamination in all case studies, albeit in varying degrees. This indicates that constructional contamination is not a particularity of the Dutch partitive genitive, but appears to be more wide-spread, affecting both morphology and syntax. Furthermore, we distinguish between two forms of constructional contamination, viz. first degree and second degree contamination, with first degree contamination producing greater effects than second degree contamination.

In Douthwaite J., PezzinI D. Words in Action: Diachronic and Synchronic Approaches to English Discourse: Studies in Honour of Ermanno Barisone.. Genova: ECTS ., 2008

This paper investigates the phenomenon of English reduplicativesof the type chit-chat, dilly-dally or hurly-burly and nitty-gritty, which appear significant on various aspects, e.g. 1) as instances of extragrammatical (or expressive) morphology, 2) as complex cases in terms of naturalness/iconicity, 3) as current processes for slangy formations, 4) as lexical devices for covering areas of morphopragmatic meanings and 5) as cases of likely difficulty in the process of translation. In this first report, only points (1) and (2) are touched upon. The topic deserves attention in linguistics, because English, like many other world languages, but unlike other Western European languages, 2 widely and productively exploits reduplication as a word formation mechanism. English reduplicatives are lexical items, contributing to the enrichment of the lexicon (not only in terms of connotations), whereas in other world languages, the mechanism more often has a functional motivation: it may express a variety of grammatical functions, from plurality to tense shifting, 3 diminutive, etc. Although difficult to describe in terms of rules, and for that reason highly neglected by grammarians, reduplicatives are by no means out of the ordinary: they are lively, productive and widespread, and they have been so for quite a number of centuries. The so-called Copy reduplicatives, i.e. based on identical member repetition (as in ha-ha), are recorded in some OE documents dating back to the year 1000, while the ablaut (riff-raff) and rhyming (hocus pocus) types appear to be fully established by the end of the sixteenth century (Minkova 2002: 133).

English Language and Linguistics, 2014

Ingo Plag The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 704. ISBN 978-0-19-957926-6. Ingo Plag The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 704. ISBN 978-0-19-957926-6. Reviewed by Pius ten Hacken, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck

Word Structure, 2015

This reference work on English morphology can be qualified as the (for a long time needed) successor to Marchand's famous handbook The categories and types of present-day English word formation, of which the second and last edition was published in 1969 . The book to be reviewed here, however, has a larger scope, as it does not only deal with word formation but also with inflection. Hence, it is a comprehensive book on English morphology. The authors of this book are all senior researchers in the domain of English morphology, with an individual track record of important publications on English morphology. So it was a good idea of these authors to work together to produce an authoritative volume on English morphology. What are the main features of this book compared to Marchand's book? First of all, it incorporates the results of decades on research on English morphology since the 1960's. Second, it is based on huge corpora, of a size that was unthinkable in the time that Marchand wrote his book. The main corpus used are COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English), the British National corpus, CELEX, and the Google Book Corpus. In addition, various dictionaries and reverse dictionaries were used. Many examples of complex words are