The n-less versus -n past participle forms of certain ablaut verbs in seventeenth and early eighteenth century American and British English.(Linguistics)

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Adam Mickiewicz University Press

ABSTRACT

The majority of publications in the field of ablaut verbs finish their analyses at the turn of the fifteenth century. Only scant mentions are given to strong or irregular verbs in later periods in the history of English, frequently in discussions of a broader scope. It has also to be pointed out that primarily the verbal system of British English is discussed, with American English being largerly neglected.

The aim of the present paper is to fill this void, at least partially, by shedding some light on the rivalry of the -n and endingless past participle forms of verbs with vowel gradation for tense in the years 1620-1720 (the century that constitutes a perfect period for the linguistic study of the beginnings of American English) in both American and British varieties of English. Since American English is said to have started to develop independently from 1620's onwards, an attempt will be also made to observe the diverging or converging tendencies which might have arisen in the century during which the transoceanic variety of English was undergoing a gradual split from the language of the mother country.

The current study is corpus-based--two corpora consisting of a collection of parallel texts have been compiled to provide material for comparison.

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1. Periodization and early American and British corpora

It is assumed that in the decades following the arrival of William Bradford and the group of separatists in Cape Cod in 1620, American English started to evolve independently--and both the language of the early American Colonies and British English commenced to undergo a process of differentiation triggered by the relatively infrequent contacts between the newly born Colonies and their mother country. Accordingly, it is worthwhile to compare both varieties of English synchronically and observe the converging or diverging trends of development occurring among the ablaut verbs in both British English and its new, regional variety.

This paper specifically concentrates on the rivalry of -n and suffixless past participle forms of ablaut verbs in seventeenth and early eighteenth century American and British English. For the purpose of the present article the time span between 1620-1720 has been chosen, since this century constitutes a perfect period for the linguistic study of the beginnings of American English. The reasons for such a choice were described at length in Kyto (1991).

In order to trace the gradual character of the changes taking place among the verbs in question, the period under discussion is further subdivided into three sub-periods (the first half of the earliest century in American history, the middle period with its turning point around 1670, and the first two decades of the eighteenth century) on the basis of a number of external factors presented in Dylewski (2002: 35-38, 2003: 149-150).

As regards the studied corpora, their description and the classification of the selected texts can be round in Dylewski (2003: 150-151, 174-176). In a nutshell, in terms of the corpus of American English, a collection of parallel texts has been compiled to provide material for synchronic comparison from the three abovementioned sub-periods. Two main guidelines were followed in the text selection: the place of production/publication as well as the text type. As for the British corpus, it was tailored as a supplementary collection aiming to parallel the American texts, and thus the selection was also dependent upon two major factors: the date of composition or publication and the purpose of a given text (text type). It should be noted that in the case of the British corpus, the adopted periodization does not reflect the language-external conditions in England, but corresponds to the three sub-periods distinguished in the first century of the development of American English.

2. The choice of verbs under scrutiny

2.1. Introduction

The ablaut class is by no means stagnant in early American and British English and one can distinguish the following tendencies operating among verbs with vowel gradation for tense: loss of the participial suffix -n, leveling of consonantal alternants, transfer to the weak conjugation, and, finally the competition of the relic preterite forms in or (brake, writ) with the ones in (broke, wrote).

For the sake of the following paper the first phenomenon will be dealt with. It has to be noted at this point that certain verbs, especially the ones not commonly used (for instance, shrive or chide), as well as certain verbal forms, were not attested or were underrepresented in the analyzed sources. Accordingly, when the amount of data instanced is too...

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