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English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning
Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 358] 2022
► pp. 91–112

Chapter 4
The threshold of productivity and the ‘irregularization’ of verbs in Early Modern English

| University of Pennsylvania
| University of Pennsylvania

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).

Keywords: Tolerance Principle, native language acquisition, Early Modern English, irregularization
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
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.04rin
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Cited by

Cited by 2 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
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

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