Chapter 4
The threshold of productivity and the ‘irregularization’ of verbs in Early Modern English
This paper tests whether Yang’s Tolerance Principle (TP) is useful in explaining one type of morphological change in the history of English. We suggest that some, but not all, innovative non-default past tenses that appear in the written record between 1500 and 1700 can be explained by the TP and thus could be the results of innovation in native language acquisition (NLA).
Article outline
- 1.The Tolerance Principle, its range and limits
- 2.English verbs in -ing
- 3.The 16th and 17th centuries
- 4.New past tense forms in Early Modern English
- 5.The productivity of /ʌ/ in Early Modern English: The case of strung
- 6.Stuck
- 7.Strike / strick, past stroke / strake / struck
- 8.Dug
- 9.Looking forward
- 10.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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