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
References (28)
References
Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study. Cognition 90(2). 119–161. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Astor, Gerald. 1994. June 6, 1944: The voices of D-Day. New York: St. Martin’s.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Berko, Jean. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14. 150–177. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Brunner, Karl. 1948. Abriß der mittelenglischen Grammatik (2nd edn.). Halle: Niemeyer.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Cheshire, Jenny. 1994. Standardization and the English irregular verbs. In Stein & Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a standard English 1600–1800, 115–133. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Dobson, Eric John. 1968. English pronunciation 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Ekwall, Eilert. 1956. Studies on the population of medieval London. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Fruehwald, Josef. 2013. Phonological influence on phonetic change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
Hogg, Richard M. 1988. Snuck: The development of irregular preterite forms. In Graham Nixon & John Honey (eds.), An historic tongue: Studies in English linguistics in memory of Barbara Strang, 31–40. London: Routledge.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Kodner, Jordan. 2019. Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora. Glossa 4(1). 122. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Kodner, Jordan. 2020. Language acquisition in the past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Lauren Delfs. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Early Modern English. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Kytö, Merja, Jonathan Culpepper & Terry Walker. 2006. A corpus of English dialogues 1560–1760. Uppsala: Department of English, Uppsala Universitet.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1. Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Labov, William. 2020. The regularity of regular sound change. Language 96. 42–59. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Lass, Roger. 1994. Proliferation and option-cutting: The strong verb in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Dieter Stein & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a standard English 1600–1800, 81–113. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Marcus, Gary F., Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T. John Rosen, Fei Xu & Harald Clahsen. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Milroy, James. 1994. The notion of “standard language” and its applicability to the study of Early Modern English pronunciation. In Dieter Stein & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a standard English 1600–1800, 19–29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nevalainen, Terttu, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Ann Taylor, Susan Pintzuk & Anthony Warner. 2006. The parsed corpus of early English correspondence. Text version. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Nida, Eugene. 1949. Morphology: The descriptive analysis of words (2nd edn.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Pinker, Steven. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York: Basic Books.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Seebold, Elmar. 1966. Die schwundstufigen Präsentien (Aoristpräsentien) der ei-Reihe. Anglia 84. 1–26. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Sneller, Elizabeth, Josef Fruehwald & Charles Yang. 2019. Using the Tolerance Principle to predict phonological change. Language Variation and Change 31(1). 1–20. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Strik, Oscar. 2015. Modelling analogical change: A history of Swedish and Frisian verb inflection. Groningen: University of Groningen dissertation.
Xu, Fei & Steven Pinker. 1995. Weird past tense forms. Journal of Child Language 22(3). 531–556. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Yang, Charles. 2016. The price of linguistic productivity: How children learn to break the rules of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Yip, Kenneth & Gerald J. Sussman. 1997. Sparse representations for fast, one-shot learning. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence 521–527.![Google Scholar](https://benjamins.com/logos/google-scholar.svg)
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Guerrero Montero, Juan, Andres Karjus, Kenny Smith & Richard A. Blythe
2023.
Reliable detection and quantification of selective forces in language change.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Yang, Charles
2023.
A User’s Defense of the Tolerance Principle: Reply to Enger (2022).
Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 145:4
► pp. 563 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Yang, Charles
2024.
Phonological Regularity and Breakdown. An Account of Vowel Length Leveling in Middle English. In
The Method Works,
► pp. 237 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.