‘I’m after giving her some flowers’

The following article comes from a special issue of English Today which focuses on Irish English in Today’s World.

Map of counties in Northern Ireland and Eire



The expression in today’s title might not make sense to a lot of readers but if you’re from Ireland then the likelihood is that it sounds very familiar and you’ll know that it means that the speaker has probably given somebody some flowers quite recently to the time of speaking.

Researcher Karen Corrigan is an expert on Irish English and she explains some of the variety’s grammatical features and how they have arisen. She emphasises the fact that Irish English emerged as a result of historical contact between Irish speakers and settlers of regional Scots and English vernaculars. This contact situation makes it difficult to determine whether the resulting grammatical structure a) has been influenced by the indigenous Irish language, b) derives from features that were in the English varieties spoken by the Scots and English settlers or c) whether innovations emerge as a result of the contact situation itself. Corrigan discusses three features of grammatical variation in Irish English and illustrates that all three processes are likely to have been involved.

The first feature is referred to as the ‘After Perfect’, like the example in the heading. It is sometimes also called the ‘Hot News Perfect’ and this is because it can be used to describe a recent event but one that has nevertheless been completed. The structure is formed by combining a form of the verb be with the preposition after followed by the continuous form of a verb e.g. he’s after breaking the window which has the same meaning as he’s just broken the window in standard English. The origin of this feature has been subject to considerable debate but the evidence points to it being a ‘calque’ or ‘loan translation’ because it is a literal translation from the same structure that exists in Irish.

The second feature is the use of double modal verbs e.g. I might could do that (to mean ‘I might be able to do that’). This structure does not occur in Irish and does not therefore derive from this source. It did, however, occur in Northern and Scottish varieties of English at the time when large numbers of these settlers arrived in Ireland and it is considered that this is how it came to be part of Irish English. Furthermore, it is only in those regions of Ireland where large numbers of Scottish and Northern English migrants settled that this feature exists today, namely the Ulster Scots areas of Counties Down and Antrim.

Finally, Corrigan talks about two special types of relative clause found in Irish English. The first is seen in ‘I’ve a cousin a nurse, she lives in Ederney’ where the word ‘she’ refers back to ‘cousin’ and seems to be used instead of a relative pronoun such as ‘who’. The second type is demonstrated by the example ‘you’ll see a wee clock in the window and it goin’ yet’ which has the meaning of ‘you’ll see a wee clock in the window which is still going’. She argues that these two strategies are generally used in more complex relative clauses and that there are parallel uses in both Irish and earlier forms of English. She also finds examples of such constructions in other contact varieties of English and in other languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese. On this basis, she argues that the structures cannot simply be traced to either Irish or earlier English sources but have emerged in line with linguistic universal principles.

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Corrigan, K. 2011. Grammatical variation in Irish English. English Today 106. Vol.27/2: 39-46.

doi:10.1017/S0266078411000198

This summary was written by Sue Fox

“I’m geet excited”

The north-eastern England region where 'geet' is a dialect feature

If the expression in today’s title is something that you would say or at least sounds familiar to you, then the chances are that you are from or live in the north-east of England.

Michael Pearce has been looking at the use of the regional dialect feature geet (possibly pronounced more like git in some parts of the north-east) and the range of functions it performs in discourse among users of social websites. Although geet is usually a feature of spoken language, it is well known that the informal written language used on social networking sites often draws on aspects of spoken discourse. 

In 2010, Pearce looked at all the publicly available web pages from the sites MySpace and Bebo which contained the terms geet or git and which occurred together with a reference to one of four places in the north-east: Sunderland, Newcastle, Durham or South Shields. He collected 150 examples of geet/git and found that it is used in four main ways; to intensify an adverb, to intensify an adjective, as a discourse marker or as a quotative.

Speakers use intensifiers to boost the force of adjectives or adverbs and Pearce found that these uses accounted for about 50 per cent of the total uses of geet/git. When boosting the intensity of an adjective or adverb, geet/git has a similar meaning to really or very. He finds examples such as ‘your songs on here are geet good’ (adjective intensifier) and ‘I know her bf (initials used to mean ‘boyfriend’) geet well and that so it’s canny’ (adverb intensifier).

Geet/git can also be used as a discourse marker, much as in the same way that many people today use like. Pearce gives examples such as ‘haven’t see you in geet ages’, ‘I was geet working it out in my head’ and ‘no, but honestly, I wasn’t meaning it git nastily’ where the use of geet/git could easily be replaced by like. In fact, Pearce shows that geet/git and like often occur together as in uses such as ‘they were like asking for a spliff and they were all geet freaks haha’ and ‘been geet ages like’. The only exception is that geet/git does not seem to be able to interchange with like when like occurs clause-finally – clause-final position is not occupied by geet/git in the corpus.

Finally, geet/git is shown to function as a quotative or an introducer of reported speech in the corpus, as in the examples ‘I was geet ‘ahh’ and ‘stacey was git ‘where’s me burger then’. Pearce states that again geet/git has similar uses and fulfils the same functions as the quotative be like e.g. she’s like ‘oh my god’.

Pearce emphasises that the use of geet/git is not a new phenomenon in the north-east; it’s been around as an intensifier at least since the 1960s. However, what is new is the way that people are now using geet/git as a discourse marker and quotative and he suggests that these uses are innovations which have arisen in the last ten years or so. Please comment below if you can provide any further insights on the history or geographical spread of this dialect feature or if you would like to add any further examples of its use.

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Pearce, M. 2011. ‘It isn’t geet good, like, but it’s canny’: a new(ish) dialect feature in North East England. English Today 27/3: 3-9.

doi:10.1017/S0266078411000307

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Really,very/dead/so interesting? How to intensify in Tyneside

                                                      dead cool frog!

We all use adjectives to describe things (lovely in it’s a lovely day, for instance), but often this is not enough for us: for as long as we have records, speakers of English have been boosting the force of their adjectives with intensifiers such as really (it’s a (really lovely day).  The words we choose as intensifiers, though, fall in and out of favour. The examples in the box illustrate favourite forms from the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare as well as our own lifetime.

He was a well good wight, a carpenter (Chaucer, Prologue, Canterbury Tales, c. 1390)

The better angel is a man right fair (W. Shakespeare. sonnet 144, c. 1596)

Some people in the office were very broad (Tyneside speaker, 1960)

It’s really bad (Tyneside speaker, c. 2008)

This is dead embarrassing (Glasgow teenager 1997)

Kate Barnfield and Isabelle Buchstaller’s research on the changing use of intensifiers by four generations of speakers over the last 60 years in Tyneside, north-east England, reveals the different processes at work as intensifiers wax and wane over time.

One process is a steady long-term gradual replacement of one form by another. This is the case of the on-going replacement of very by really. Barnfield and Buchstaller show that back in the 1960s people in Tyneside used really only with two kinds of adjective: those describing human characteristics (like kind or posh) and those describing a value (such as good or bad). Gradually, though, people began to use really with other kinds of adjectives, so that by the 1990s it was occurring with any type. Then, once fully established in this way, really became more specialised. In the most recent Tyneside data the overall frequencies of really have not changed, but it is heard more often with adjectives referring to age (new, young), measurement (big, thick) and speed (fast, slow).

This gradual process contrasts with the more explosive introduction of dead in Tyneside, which burst into use across almost all categories of adjective simultaneously. Dead did not occur at all in the 1960s Tyneside data, but by 1994 it had soared in frequency to become the most popular form for younger speakers (aged between 18 and 40). Interestingly, dead seems to be a case of “linguistic recycling”. It is attested in the Oxford English Dictionary as far back as 1589, but then fell from popularity until its recent resurgence. The return to favour has not lasted long, though. By 2007 dead had become the least frequently used intensifier for young people rather than the most frequent one – a complete reversal of fortune. As Barnfield and Buchstaller point out, this type of change represents a linguistic fad: young people see a particular form as trendy for a while but the next generation then spurns it and finds new ways to boost the force of their adjectives. Unlike steady long-term changes such as the introduction of really, which has been taken up by young people right across the UK, linguistic fads tend to vary from one region to another. The signs in Tyneside are that the next local fad will be pure, a form that may have been imported from Glasgow, though canny and proper are also beginning to be used.

A final pattern of change revealed by the Tyneside data is slow-motion and gradual. So (it’s so lovely) has gently increased in frequency over the last few decades, representing just 7.5 per cent of all intensifiers used in 1990 and still only 9.1 per cent in 2007. The slow rise in frequency of so goes hand in hand with a gradual expansion of the types of adjective with which it is used. The modest increases in frequency seem to have prevented it becoming associated with any particular age group and, as a result, younger speakers do not replace it with other forms, leaving it free to continue a slow expansion across adjective type and across the generations.

Although different types of intensifiers arrive in people’s speech in distinct ways (linguistic fads with all types of adjective, long-term replacements more gradually), there seems to be only one way for them to decline. In the 2007 data, both very and dead still occur in young people’s speech, albeit with low frequencies. Both, though, still occur with all types of adjective. As intensifiers fall out of use, then, it is only the absolute frequencies that decrease ­– the distribution across different categories of adjective stays the same.

Barnfield and Buchstaller’s research reveals that not only do younger generations of speakers in Tyneside use different intensifiers from previous generations, they also use more of them overall. There are, of course, other ways of intensifying the force of an adjective, such as simply choosing a more dramatic word (saying for example, that’s a wonderful idea rather than simply that’s a good idea), but the fact that speakers of English are choosing to use intensifiers more often that before is intriguing. In any event, the Tyneside research confirms that this is an area of English grammar where there is constant change and renewal, and it reveals the orderly systematic processes by which change and renewal take place.

For English Language teaching resources and for a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.  

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Barnfield, Kate and Buchstaller, Isabelle 2010 Intensifiers in Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends. English World-Wide 31 (3): 252-287.

doi 10.1075/eww.31.3.02bar

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Useful resource for English Language teachers

Emma Moore's Language and Identity in the National Curriculum: A Scheme of Work

What’s going on with you guys?

 Which one of you guys stole my biscuit?

How do we cope with the ambiguity of you in English? When we say to a group of friends what have you been doing recently? are we asking just one of them, or two or more of them? Research by Theresa Heyd suggests that young people are resolving the potential ambiguity by coining a new pronoun, you guys, used only when they want to refer to more than one person. She traces the development of you guys over a ten year period in the Friends TV series (noting that young people in Britain are also beginning to use you guys as a new plural pronoun).

The six central characters in Friends used both you guys and you when they were referring to more than one individual, but overall you guys was the more frequent form. It accounted for 48 per cent of second person plural forms, whereas you accounted for 42 per cent. Other forms, such as all of you or you all, accounted for about 10 per cent. More important than the overall frequency of you guys, though, is the fine detail of how the characters use the form over the period, as this reveals some of the general pathways through which this kind of language change can occur.

You guys seems to have evolved from contexts that are more emotive and discourse-oriented. Its most frequent use is as a vocative, directly involving the people being addressed, as in Phoebe’s hey you guys, I don’t mean to make things worse but umm I don’t want to live with Rachel anymore.  Gradually, though, you guys comes to be used in more neutral contexts, and becomes part of the grammatical structure of the language. Over the ten year period it is increasingly used as a subject pronoun (as in you guys were a lot more supportive when I wanted to make denim furniture – again from Phoebe) and then as an object or indirect object pronoun (as in I’ll give you guys a break).  At the beginning of the period you guys was heard more often than expected in questions, which also directly involve the people being addressed (since there is an expectation that they will reply to the question), but it is then used more and more frequently in non-questions, a further indication that it is losing its emotive connotations and behaving more like an ordinary pronoun form.

The development of the pronoun goes hand in hand with a change in the

meaning of the noun guy. Although guy once referred only to male humans,

its main use now is for ‘mixed reference’, to a group of both males and

females.  As a pronoun, you guys in Friends also has mixed reference most of

the time: 67% of the forms referred to one (or more) male and one (or more)

female together. Heyd notes that in other situations (outside the Friends

series) you guys is even heard referring to non-humans, a further indication

that its meaning is now bleached: she gives the example of “what happened

to you guys?” uttered by a scientist to the dinosaurs he is studying.

In the earliest Friends programmes, female characters lead in using you guys as a plural pronoun. Eventually, though, the male characters overtake them – a gender pattern that is often attested when language changes.

One question raised by this study is whether the language heard in Friends accurately reflects the language used in everyday life. Heyd finds that the frequency of you guys in Friends is far higher than in the spoken sections of the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the same ten year period.  It is also higher than in a 2008 corpus of email hoaxes. She points out that although the Friends dialogue sounds convincingly representative of the spontaneous English of young urban professionals, it is of course more meticulously scripted, rehearsed and refined than real–life spontaneous conversation. Scriptwriters may strategically employ innovative features such as a new pronoun form to help “stage” contemporary speech. What remains to be seen is whether the heightened influence of innovative forms such as you guys in a popular TV series like Friends might influence the language use of its viewers.

For English Language teaching resources and a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.

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Theresa Heyd (2010) How you guys doin’? Staged orality and emerging plural address in the television series Friends. American Speech 85 (1): 33-66.

doi 10.1215/00031283-2010-002

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Workshop for English Language teachers

Analysing spoken English: Resources and techniques for teachers

University of Salford
Wednesday 18 April 2012

What’s special about human communication?

Children understand the 'logic of cooperation' from a very young age

Apes and other living creatures have some ability to communicate, but human communication is unique in relying on a basic shared assumption that we want to cooperate with each other.  New research from Germany shows that children who are just beginning to acquire language can already understand this underlying “logic of cooperation”.

Three researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig conducted a series of ingenious experiments with 48 children – 21 girls and 27 boys – aged 21 months. An adult researcher first played on the floor with a child, using several objects that became  interesting when something was added to them, such as a torch that could be switched on when a battery was inserted. Later, the researcher sat at a table holding a basket containing the objects in one hand, and taking one object from the basket to hold in her other hand. Both hands, then, were occupied. In the case of the torch, one battery was on the table where the researcher was sitting, and another battery was on a table at the other side of the room. The child was sitting on their parent’s knee, mid way between the two tables. The researcher suggested that they play with the torch again, then pretended to only just notice that both her hands were occupied.  She then said to the child “oh but I still need the battery. What do I do now? Can you help me please?” Although the children could have decided to get either of the two batteries to help the researcher switch on the torch, most of them chose to get the one that was on her table. This also happened when the researcher did not ask for help, but instead simply suggested that the child could join in the game, saying “Now you can do it. Take a battery”.

Things changed when the researcher had one hand free. This time she again asked for help, holding the torch in one hand and holding out the other hand with the palm up, ready to receive the battery. In this case twice as many children as before chose to go and fetch the battery that was on the table at the other side of the room.

The differences in the children’s behaviour, the researchers argue, shows that even very young children take account of the adult’s situation when interpreting a request that is ambiguous. They chose the distant battery more often when it was the only one the researcher needed help retrieving: when one hand was free, she could have easily picked up the battery that was close to her, so the child works out that she must need the other one. Not all the children could do this, but the fact that twice as many fetched the distant object when one of the researcher’s hands was free shows that even at this very young age, children can put themselves in the position of the person making a request in order to work out what is needed. As they acquire language, then, children also begin to appreciate the cooperative and rational nature of human communication.

Gerlind Grosse, Henrike Moll and Michael Tomasello (2010) 21-Month-olds understand the cooperative logic of requests. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3377-3383.

doi 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.05.005

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Is there a global ‘call centre’ speech style?

Good morning madam, how are you today?

                                                                                 

Most research which has investigated the globalization effects on language has focused on the spread of English and the way that it supplants local languages, particularly in domains such as business, higher education and politics. But can globalization also entail the exportation of a particular speech style? Can people continue to speak in the language associated with their national or ethnic identity while using a speech style which is not necessarily associated with that same nationality or ethnicity?

Researcher Anna Kristina Hultgren has been investigating the speech style of call centre operators. Operators are generally given very explicit instructions on how they must speak in interactions with customers and these rules are often incorporated in documents, taught in communication training programmes and regularly assessed. Hultgren identifies a ‘rapport-building’ speech style prescribed to call centre workers in four countries – Denmark (DK), Britain (UK), Hong Kong (HK) and the Philippines (PH). Although the call centre agents communicate in different language varieties, the prescribed speech style is very similar in all four countries.

Across all four call centres agents are advised to make customers feel as though they are being listened to and in some cases are even given devices, such as ‘urgh huh’, ‘ok’ and ‘I know’, which they can deploy to show that they are engaged in ‘active listening’. Related to this, agents must also acknowledge the customer needs and make them feel understood. The agents are told that this understanding can be signalled by such things as ‘summarising’ (UK), ‘confirming’ (DK), ‘’checking/paraphrasing’ (HK) and ‘restating’ the problem, all very similar strategies. Equally important is the fact that the agents must make themselves understood. They are told to avoid jargon, technical terms and company-internal lingo, again a feature listed in the materials of all four call centres. Other ways that the agents are told to ensure that they are making themselves clear are by using ‘signposting’, ‘summarising’ or ‘headline techniques’; in other words, not just doing what the caller has asked them to do but also actively communicating to the customer what action they are taking. Finally, the importance of ‘empathy’ is highlighted across all four sets of materials. The agents are often told to engage callers in small-talk which is usually unrelated to the transaction in hand. Some of the materials even suggest topics for small talk. These can be such things as asking how the caller is at the beginning of the caller, asking about the weather or making general conversation. Is all this sounding rather familiar?  

In the second part of the investigation, Hultgren looks at the compliance to these prescriptive rules in British and Danish contexts. She considers eight different variables and finds no significant differences for four of those variables; ‘ending the transaction on a personal note’, ‘thanking the customer for the call’, ‘providing a summary of the interaction’ and ‘engaging in active listening’. However, for the other four variables –'greeting’, ‘acknowledgment’, ‘hold notification’ and ‘check understanding’ – there was a significant difference between the two countries. These differences are attributed to the Danish agents being more unwilling to engage interpersonally with the customer than their British counterparts.

Despite these localized adaptations of the prescribed rules, Hultgren concludes by arguing that there is a global ‘call centre’ style, derived originally from ‘North-American cultural preferences for informality and rapport’ which is being exported independently of language. It is not about making everyone speak the same language but about letting them speak their own language but in a style that does not necessarily align with their ethno-cultural identity.

For English Language teaching resources and for a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.

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Hultgren, A.K. (2011). ‘Building rapport’ with customers across the world: The global diffusion of a call centre style. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/1: 36-64.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00466.x

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Young people’s language and stuff like that

                                     A: cos we made like a video

                                     B: yeah I saw it

                                     A: you remember, right?

                                     B: yeah

                                     A: so er we made her a video and stuff

Why do people use phrases like and stuff? Researchers Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis analysed phrases like and everything, and stuff, and things, or whatever and or something in a 1.2 million word corpus of Canadian English and compared their findings with previous research from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Their research confirms that these little phrases, often known as ‘general extenders’, have important functions in spoken language.

            The reason for using the term ‘general extenders’ is that forms like and stuff, and things, or something and or whatever often indicate that the previous word is part of a set, so they extend its meaning but without having to specify all the members of the set. For example, or whatever in you can get a hamburger or whatever refers to a set of things that could be on a fast food menu, including, perhaps, a hot dog or French fries. Referring to a set is not necessarily their most important function though. Sometimes people use these little words to be purposely vague, to signal that they are not quite sure about something. However their most important function seems to be to create solidarity between speakers. By using a general extender the person speaking suggests that their interlocutor shares their knowledge or opinion, so there is no need to be explicit. Perhaps this is why speaker A uses and stuff in the exchange above, where the speakers are talking only about a video, not about a set of things that includes videos. And stuff also marks the end of speaker A’s turn, as well as indicating that the video could become a topic of the conversation.

            Tagliamonte and Denis show that different types of language change in the general extenders are taking place in the UK and in Toronto. In the UK, older speakers prefer longer forms such as and things like that whereas younger people tend to shorten the forms to and things or and stuff. Also, older people tend to use a general extender form that matches the word or phase that they are attached to. For example they use and stuff with a mass noun that matches the idea of ‘stuff’, such as water or fun, and and things with a count noun like cats or dogs. Younger people on the other hand use a general extender as an independent form that doesn’t have to match the word or phrase that it is attached to. In the UK, then, general extenders are losing their original meaning of ‘stuff’ or ‘things’ and are becoming independent discourse particles.

            In the Toronto corpus older speakers as well as younger people use general extenders as independent particles, so this language change (‘semantic bleaching’) must have happened earlier than in the UK. However, in Toronto people of all ages use both the long forms and the short forms of the general extenders with about the same frequency. There is no evidence, then, that short forms like and everything are taking over from longer forms such as and everything like that, as they seem to be in the UK. Instead, a different kind of change is taking place in Toronto. People aged 40 and above have two favourite general extender forms: one with things and one with stuff (so they use many forms such as and stuff, and stuff like that, and and that kind of stuff as well as and things, and things like that and all that kind of thing). As speakers get younger, though, things plummets in frequency and its place is taken by stuff. This is different from the UK, where previous research suggests that there are social class differences in the forms that young people use: both and stuff and and things are preferred by young people from the middle classes whereas and that is associated with working class speakers. In Toronto, and that is rarely heard.

            A search on Google for the and stuff general extender forms found about 24 million hits, leading Tagliamonte and Denis to conclude that stuff has “plainly surged in frequency”. What remains to be seen is whether this surge will affect the general extender forms that are used elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Perhaps we will all eventually mostly say and stuff. Alternatively, a completely different new form may emerge. After all, new forms have continued to develop over the last 600 years. Whatever happens, these little words serve such important functions in conversation that general extenders in one form or another are bound to survive.

For English Language teaching resources and for a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.

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Tagliamonte, S. and Denis, D. 2010 The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics 38 (4): 335-368.

doi: 10.1177/0075424210367484

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

I sang the song or I sung the song? What do YOU say?

 

What do the verbs hang, spin, sling, sting, dig and slink all have in common? Answer: they all form their past tense and past participle by changing their vowel to <u>, so that I spin the wheel becomes I spun the wheel in the past tense and I’ve spun the wheel in the present perfect tense (using the past participle). So, what happens with verbs like begin, sing, drink, ring, shrink, spring, sling, stink and swim? On the face of it, these verbs look very similar to the first group of verbs but they behave differently.  In standard English these verbs have a past tense form with <a> and a different past participle form with <u>, resulting in three-part paradigms like begin - began- begun and sing - sang - sung.

However, it soon becomes clear – as researcher Lieselotte Anderwald has discovered – that there is frequently variation between two past tense forms in the second group of verbs. This variation is quite often reflected in the entries of some dictionaries, which permit an either/or past tense form for these verbs. For example, the Longman Advanced Dictionary of Contemporary English Use gives the past tense of shrink as shrank or shrunk and the past tense of sink as sank or sunk, with, in this dictionary, the second of the two past tense forms being attributed to American English usage (though this is not always the case in other dictionaries).

Anderwald investigated the use of <a> vs <u> forms among traditional dialect speakers in the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a corpus of traditional dialect data by speakers born (mainly) pre-1920 from across the UK. All instances of past tense forms of the most frequently occurring verbs that have the three-part paradigm - sink, drink, ring, sing, begin – were extracted from all dialect areas and each use was classified as being standard (e.g. sang) or non-standard (e.g. sung). From a total of 218 past tense uses she found that the non-standard forms were used in 91 (42%) cases. She then compared the traditional dialect speakers with young working class urban speakers from the Corpus of London Teenage Speech (COLT) and found that they used the non-standard forms almost 67% of the time (although we should add a cautionary note that there were only 12 instances of use in the corpus for this social group). Despite pressure from prescriptive norms, the results show that the use of non-standard forms for these verbs is as robust today as it has been in the past.

Anderwald explains this persistence in two ways. Firstly, the non-standard forms can be traced back historically to Old English so they are a long-standing feature of vernacular English. More importantly, though, she points out that the majority of verbs in English have the same form for past tense and past participle (not only those listed in the beginning of this article but also all regular verbs, which simply add -ed to both past forms) and therefore using the non-standard form in verbs like sing and drink is more ‘natural’ than their standard English counterparts because it conforms to the dominant pattern in English and thus eases the cognitive load of the language user. So if you say I sung the song – don’t worry, you’re in good company!

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Anderwald, L. 2011. Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung. English Language and Linguistics 15.1: 85-112.

doi:10.1017/S1360674310000298

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Image by ~bdavila on deviantART