영어 불규칙 동사의 최근 변화: 규칙화와 과거(분사)의 형태적 평준화에 대하여

On the Regularization and Leveling of Past and Past Participle Form of English Irregular Verbs

This article is concerned with the recent development of English irregular verbs. In particular, it is argued, through the quantitative analysis of the large-scale corpora of both American and British English (COHA, COCA, and BNC), that irregular verbs keep on changing towards a greater use of the regular -ed pattern. Regularization has been the most prominent development of irregular verbs in the history of English. The tendency is still observed in the recent English. Another development is the morphological coalescence or leveling of past and past participle forms. In some cases past forms are used instead of the expected past participles, while past participles are used for the past in others. The selection of the coalesced form is decided in terms of the productivity of the form, and productive forms can be described through the notion schema, as proposed by Bybee and Slobin(1982), Modor(2006), and Slobin(2006). The more productive form, which conforms to the schema, is generally selected as the coalesced form, Lastly and less importantly, these two tendencies of the recent changes are a little more advanced in American English than in British English, proving the conservativeness of British English once again.