Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (i.e., simple past; e.g., I broke the door) and the past participle (e.g., I’ve broken the door). These verbs may variably show use of the preterite form in place of the participle (e.g., I’ve broke the door), which the authors call participle leveling. This article contributes the first detailed variationist study of participle leveling by investigating the phenomenon in perfect constructions using data collected from three corpora of conversational speech: two of American English and one of British English. A striking degree of similarity is found between the three corpora in both the linguistic and the extralinguistic constraints on variation. Constraints on participle leveling include tense of the perfect construction, verb frequency, and phonological similarity between preterite and participle forms. The variable is stable in real time and socially stratified. The article relates the findings to theoretical linguistic treatments of the variation and to questions of its origin and spread in Englishes transatlantically.
“I’ve Always Spoke Like This, You See”: Preterite-to-Participle Leveling in American and British Englishes
ALICIA CHATTEN is a product manager at Kargo Global LLC, where she works with data science teams to investigate disparate questions in advertising technology. Her research in linguistics at New York University focused on phonological typology, especially with respect to the role of abstract prosodic structure at the interfaces with morphology and phonetics. Email: [email protected].
KIMBERLEY BAXTER is a Ph.D. candidate in New York University’s Department of Linguistics. She specializes in computational sociolinguistics, syntax, and forensic linguistics. Email: [email protected].
ERWANNE MAS is a Ph.D. candidate at the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France. Her research focuses on phonetic and lexical variations in Australian English. Email: [email protected].
JAILYN PEÑA is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her research focuses on the phonetics and perception of voice quality and psycholinguistics. She also has secondary interests in the production and perception of different speech styles, including conversational and clear speech. Email: [email protected].
GUY TABACHNICK is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science of Language at the Univerza v Novi Gorici in Slovenia. His research interests include lexical variation in inflectional morphology and the syntax of Slavic clitics. Email: [email protected].
DANIEL DUNCAN is senior lecturer in sociolinguistics at Newcastle University. His primary research interest concerns the sociolinguistics of place, particularly the effect of public policy on language variation and change in metropolitan areas. Other research interests include St. Louis English and how linguistic variation is represented in the grammar. Recent work of his has appeared in Journal of English Linguistics, American Speech, and Language in Society. Email: [email protected].
LAUREL MacKENZIE is an associate professor at New York University, where she codirects the Sociolinguistics Lab. Her research interests include the mental representation of sociolinguistic variation, regional varieties of British and American English, and language change across the life span. She is a coauthor of Doing Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide to Data Collection and Analysis (with Miriam Meyerhoff and Erik Schleef; Routledge, 2015). Email: [email protected].
Alicia Chatten, Kimberley Baxter, Erwanne Mas, Jailyn Peña, Guy Tabachnick, Daniel Duncan, Laurel MacKenzie; “I’ve Always Spoke Like This, You See”: Preterite-to-Participle Leveling in American and British Englishes. American Speech 1 February 2024; 99 (1): 3–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9940654
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