Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (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 we call participle leveling. This paper 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 paper 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-for-participle leveling in American and British Englishes
Alicia Chatten is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research focuses on phonological typology, especially with respect to the role of abstract prosodic structure at the interfaces with morphology and phonetics. Email: alchatten@nyu.edu.
Kimberley Baxter is a fourth year Ph.D. student in NYU’s Linguistics department. She specializes in computational sociolinguistics, syntax, and forensic linguistics. Email: keb565@nyu.edu.
Erwanne Mas is a Master’s student and a soon-to-be Ph.D. candidate at the ENS de Lyon (France). Her research focuses on phonetic and lexical variations in New Zealand and Australian Englishes. Email: erwanne.mas@ens-lyon.fr.
Jailyn Peña is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research focuses on the phonetics of voice quality, bilingualism, and psycholinguistics. She has secondary interests in the production and perception of different speech styles, including conversational and clear speech. Email: jailynpena@nyu.edu.
Guy Tabachnick is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at New York University. His research focuses on lexical variation in inflectional morphology, primarily in Hungarian and Slavic languages. Email: guyt@nyu.edu.
Daniel Duncan is 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: daniel.duncan@ncl.ac.uk.
Laurel Mackenzie is an Assistant Professor at New York University, where she co-directs 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 lifespan. She is an Area Editor in the area of Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics for Linguistics Vanguard, and is a co-author of Doing Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide to Data Collection and Analysis. Email: laurel.mackenzie@nyu.edu.
Alicia Chatten, Kimberley Baxter, Erwanne Mas, Jailyn Peña, Guy Tabachnick, Daniel Duncan, Laurel MacKenzie; “I’ve always spoke like this, you see”: Preterite-for-participle leveling in American and British Englishes. American Speech 2022; doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9940654
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