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A Corpus-Based Study of Past Tense Spreading (PTS) in Perfect Constructions in Spoken English
Dalarna University, School of Language, Literatures and Learning.
2025 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

This study aims to investigate the current state of the phenomenon called past tense spreading (PTS), a linguistic variation in which the past tense form is used instead of the past participlein perfect constructions (e.g., I should have wrote it down rather than the standard form I should have written it down) in contemporary English. Focusing on spoken English, the study examined the overall rate of PTS in perfect constructions, the rate of modal auxiliaries in PTS constructions, and the rates of PTS in British and American English. The data were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus 2014. To analyze PTSs in the spoken components of the two corpora, the departure point was Geeaert and Newman’s (2011) comprehensive list of 47 verbs with distinct simple past tense and pastparticiple forms. The results show that some verbs yielding very few tokens overall have higher rates of PTS, and high-frequency verbs tend to have lower rates. Supporting previous findings, the findings show a relationship between modal verbs and PTS. A slight difference between British and American usage of PTS was also found, which is largely in accordance with previous findings. Overall, the results of the study indicate that PTS persists, albeit to a limited extent, in British and American spoken English.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025.
Keywords [en]
past tense spreading (PTS), non-standard variation, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics
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Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-49989OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-49989DiVA, id: diva2:1927794
Subject / course
English
Available from: 2025-01-15 Created: 2025-01-15 Last updated: 2025-10-09

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf