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Participle Levelling in American English: Syntactic Differentiation and Auxiliary Have Alan Munn Michigan State University

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Participle Levelling in American English: Syntactic Differentiation and Auxiliary Have Alan Munn Michigan State University Participle Levelling in American English: syntactic differentiation and auxiliary have Alan Munn Michigan State University Introduction In this paper we provide experimental evidence from spoken acceptability judge- ment tasks of levelling of perfect participles in American English. The levelling is a variable phe- nomenon, and leads to the introduction of morphological doublets into the grammar of speakers who level. Our data shows that speakers judged levelled forms differentially depending the syntac- tic environment of the participle. Levelling is judged to be possible in contexts where the auxiliary have can be realized as of (Kayne 1997; Munn et al. 2015). Corpus data collected from Twitter (Bybel 2014) matches well with the experimental facts. We propose an analysis of the levelling facts based on impoverishment, following Nevins and Parrott (2010) although we do not adopt their variable rules schema. Patterns of levelling It has long been noticed (at least as far back as Mencken (1923)) that lev- elling of the participle in these verbs occurs, i.e., the form of the participle becomes identical to the form of the preterite. This means that for some speakers, the /–en/ forms are either missing or vary with the standard forms to some degree. Thus alongside John could have eaten more we have examples like John could have ate more. The levelled forms are considered to be non-standard and are found in most, if not all varieties of English including British English (Cheshire 1982; Sampson 2002; Smith 2004), Australian English (Eisikovits 1987) and American English (Bloomer 2002; Mencken 1923; Wolfram and Christian 1976). To the extent that these studies address the issue of the ‘standardness‘ of the levelling, there is agreement that the levelled form is the non-standard. Experimental design We used a spoken acceptability judgement task to assess speakers ratings of levelled and unlevelled participles in four grammatical conditions: perfect+modal, present per- fect, infinitival perfect and past perfect. In each case we compared the perfect participle judgements with passive participle judgements. We report data here from three conditions. Different groups of participants received either levelled or unlevelled participles; each group heard sentences from only one condition. There were 20 experimental sentences in each set (10 passives and 10 participles) along with 50 filler sentences (30 grammatical and 20 ungrammatical) which served as controls. Sentences were recorded by a local native speaker, and presented in random order (same order for each participant). Participants (undergraduates at a large midwestern American university) heard each sentence once with approximately 5 seconds between each, and were asked to judge the sen- tences on a scale of 1–5. Examples of the experimental sentences are given in Table 1. Results and discussion Ratings for the control sentences are shown in Figure 1. The results for the experimental sentences are shown in Figure 2. ANOVAs were run on the data comparing the Perfect and Passive conditions in each of the three syntactic conditions. In all three syntactic conditions there was a significant main effect of levelling: levelled sentences were rated lower than unlevelled sentences. There were also significant main effects of sentence type. In the Modal and Present perfect conditions, perfects were rated higher than passives. This pattern reversed in the Infinitival perfect condition, which is to be expected given the relative complexity of those sentences. Importantly, however, in both the Infinitival and Modal perfect contexts there was a significant interaction between levelling and sentence type: levelling was relatively better in the perfect conditions compared the the passive conditions. No such interaction was found in the present perfect condition. Our data show a pattern in which the levelling of the participle is sensitive to the syntactic context of the auxiliary. The contexts in which the levelling is permitted by our speakers is exactly those in which the auxiliary have can be realized as of (Kayne 1997; Munn et al. 2015). Adopting for concreteness the analysis of the English verbals system given in Halle and Marantz (1993) (but see Tortora et al. (2013) for a more radical view) we proposal a variable rule analysis in which levelling speakers impoverish the feature Participle in the context of auxiliary of. Table 1: Experimental sentences Sentence Condition I could’ve drunk/drank more, but I had an interview the next day. Modal+perfect Gerald has drunk/drank orange juice for breakfast twice this week. Present perfect She needs to have drank all her water before she can take her pills. Infinitival perfect The party ended before all the beer was drunk/drank. Passive Inf Modal Present Inf Modal Present 5 5 4 4 Group Group 3 Levelled 3 Levelled Unlevelled Unlevelled MeanRating MeanRating 2 2 1 1 Gram UnGram Gram UnGram Gram UnGram Passive Perfect Passive Perfect Passive Perfect SentenceType SentenceType Figure 1: Ratings of control sentences Figure 2: Ratings of experimental sentences Selected References Bybel, K. 2014. “Maybe I shoulda went to work today”: participle level- ing in American English. ms. Michigan State University. Halle, M. and A. Marantz. 1993. Dis- tributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection. In: The View from Building 20. Ed. by K. Hale and S. J. Keyser. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Pp. 111–176. Kayne, R. S. 1997. The English complementizer of. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1. 43–54. Munn, A. et al. 2015. Towards a theory of variation in English participial verb forms: the relevance of auxil- iary morpho-syntax. ms. Michigan State University and CUNY. Nevins, A. and J. Parrott. 2010. Variable rules meet Impoverishment theory: Patterns of agreement leveling in English varieties. Lingua 120. 1135–1159. Tortora, C. et al. Sept. 2013. Variation in Appalachian verb forms: ev- idence for a general past. Paper presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Austin TX..
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