Chapter 5 Rules and Schemasin the Development and Use of the English Past Tense

Abstract

Abstract English verbal morphology is rather restricted, compared to that of a full-fledged inflectional language, since it offers only four inflectional morphemes: the 3s present, the past tense, the past participle, and the progressive. Thus it provides no opportunity to study the complex interaction between intersecting inflectional categories within a paradigm, such as person, number, mood, and tense. It does, however, provide the opportunity for a study of a different sort: although English has a demonstrably productive process of suffixation for past-tense formation, in the form of -ed, it also has many irregular verbs whose past tense is formed in some cases without suffixation and in others with changes of vowel (or, less commonly, consonant) in the stem. This chapter discusses the English past tense in children and adults, taking into account the type frequency of the irregular patterns, the token frequency of members of the irregular classes, the phonological similarity between the base and the past, and the phonological similarity among past forms themselves.