Article published in:
English World-Wide
Vol. 43:3 (2022) ► pp. 267–296

He come out and give me a beer but he never seen the bear

Vernacular preterites in Ontario dialects

| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto

In this study, we examine variation in English strong verb preterite/participle morphology in four frequent verbs: came/come, saw/seen, gave/give and did/done, using data from more than a dozen Ontario communities, socially stratified by age, sex, occupation and education, representing a continuum of urban/rural locations and spanning more than 100 years in apparent-time. Comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling permit testing of social, geographic and linguistic factors on the variation. Despite strong social constraints, linguistic constraints are also significant. We argue that standardization and increasing literacy have nearly eradicated the vernacular preterite forms, but they are not moribund yet. Moreover, at least one form is stable, preterite seen. The non-standard variants endure as sociolinguistic markers, perhaps due to locally situated prestige, particularly in non-urban communities.

Keywords: preterite verbs, Ontario English (Canada), vernacular universals, obsolescence, sociolinguistics, language variation, language change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1 Come – came
    • 1.2 Seen – saw
    • 1.3 Give – gave
    • 1.4 Done – did
  • 2.The data and methodology
  • 3.Social factors and distributional analysis
    • 3.1Community
    • 3.2Year of birth
    • 3.3Linguistic factors
  • 4.Statistical modelling
    • 4.1Ontario communities
    • 4.2Ontario generations
    • 4.3Mixed effects model, all verbs
    • 4.4Individual verbs
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 20 September 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.20014.jan
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