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- Title
Calculating a pattern’s competitive strength.
- Authors
Hoekstra, Eric; Merkuur, Anne; Sloos, Marjoleine; Weijer, Jeroen van de
- Abstract
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 (<xref>Bybee & Slobin 2007</xref>, <xref>Bybee & Moder 2007</xref>). 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.
- Subjects
TENSE (Grammar); TENSE in the English language; IRREGULAR verbs (Grammar); INFLECTION (Grammar); LEXEME
- Publication
Mental Lexicon, 2018, Vol 13, Issue 1, p143
- ISSN
1871-1340
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/ml.17019.hoe