Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: The case of past tense sang vs sung

Abstract

In this article I discuss the persistence of non-standard past tense forms in traditional and modern dialect data in the face of strong prescriptive norms against such non-standard forms. Past tense forms like she drunk or they sung are still encountered frequently, although prescriptive grammars have militated against such usage for over a century, as a detailed investigation of nineteenth-century grammar books can show. I will argue that an increasing insistence especially by British nineteenth-century grammarians on distinct paradigm forms like drink – drank – drunk is based on a (mistaken) Latin ideal and that it has not carried much weight with the ‘average’ speaker for functional reasons: non-standard forms in can be functionally motivated and are more ‘natural’ past tense forms in the sense of Wurzel (1984). © 2011, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.