Methodological and analytic considerations
Calculating a pattern’s competitive strength
Competition between /æ/ and /ʌ/ in irregular simple pasts and past participles in English
Jeroen van de Weijer | Shenzhen University
This article proposes a measure of the competitive strength of two rival patterns in the domain of a subgroup of irregular verbs in
English. There is competition between simple pasts built on the vowels /æ/ and /ʌ/, and the same competition is found in the
domain of past participles. As a result of such competition, the past tense stang (from sting)
was replaced with stung. The /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than the /æ/ forms (Bybee & Slobin 2007, Bybee & Moder
2007). To understand this, we counted the number of types for /æ/ (such as sang, rang)
and /ʌ/ (such as stung, stuck) in the irregular simple past and did the same in the irregular participle (such as
sat, had and sung, done). We calculated a measure of competitiveness for these two patterns
incorporating type frequency and token frequency. This measure was used to explain why /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than
/æ/ forms.
Article outline
- 1.Competition and change
- 2.Empirical evidence showing that the /ʌ/ pattern is more competitive than the /æ/ pattern
- 2.1Historical evidence
- 2.2Evidence from dialects
- 2.3Evidence from errors
- 3.The calculation of competitive strength
- 3.1Type frequency and token frequency
- 3.2A formalisation of the relation between type frequency and token frequency
- 3.3Calculating the competitive strength of the /æ/ pattern and the /ʌ/ pattern
- 4.Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
-
References
Published online: 10 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17019.hoe
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17019.hoe
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Cited by
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van de Weijer, Jeroen, Weiyun Wei, Yumeng Wang, Guangyuan Ren & Yunyun Ran
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