New Zealand English Grammar: Fact or Fiction?

In her book New Zealand English Grammar: Fact or Fiction?, Marianne Hundt presents a series of comparative corpus studies focusing on irregular and regular verbs in NZE newspaper texts (1998: 29–38). A major goal for this thesis is to expand upon Hundt’s study by adding more verbs, a larger corpus, and taking diachronic change into account.

According to Hundt, NZE is not a mere reflection of British or American norms: for certain verbs (smell, spell), the NZE usage is British, while for others (burn), NZE is said to take after AmE (ibid.: 29).

Hundt’s first study, regarding the verbs burn, learn, and dream, compares their past tense usage in the New Zealand based newspapers Dominion and Evening Post (both of which are coincidentally featured in the corpus that is analyzed in this thesis) to those in The Guardian (BrE) and Miami Herald (AmE) (Hundt 1998: 29–30). In the use of these verbs, NZE was found by Hundt to be very close to BrE in usage, with both varieties using regular and irregular forms extensively for each verb (ibid.: 30). American English seems to be the outlier, exhibiting universal or near-universal preference for regular forms (ibid.). The irregular form burnt was found by Hundt to be used more often as a participle than in simple past tense, while no such difference exists for learnt (ibid.). In adjectival

usage, burn shows a greater preference for irregular form, except in the highly regularized AmE (ibid.: 31). Learn, on the other hand, assumes the regular form learned almost exclusively when used as an adjective (ibid.).

In her second study of irregular verbs, Hundt (1998: 31–3) expands the scope into nine verbs, adding lean, leap, smell, spell, spill, and spoil, and focusing on the differences between British, Australian, and New Zealand English. The main finding of the study is that AusE and NZE bear striking resemblance to each other regarding the use of irregular past tense forms, while regularization seems to be the most advanced in BrE (ibid.: 32). This greater conservatism in the postcolonial varieties is interpreted by Hundt to be a manifestation of colonial lag (ibid.: 33). It is, however, worth noting that the dataset used by Hundt is very small: for each corpus, there are only a little over 200 tokens in total, spread between nine verbs with two possible variants each (Hundt 1998: 32).

This means that the results would be easily swayed by only a few statistical outliers.

In the third study, Hundt (1998: 33–6) focuses on the participial forms of prove in NZE, BrE, and AmE. Hundt notes that proven is the more common form in American English, and that the form is actually gaining ground despite being irregular (ibid.: 33).

The results show that NZE takes the intermediate position in the adoption of proven – the proportion of proven is not as large as in AmE, but larger than in BrE (ibid.: 34).

According to Hundt (ibid.), adjectival use of proven is to more readily accepted than participial use in NZE. Overall, the rise in the form proven is seen by Hundt to be an exception to a general trend of regularization, and Hundt even goes as far as theorizing that proven might completely replace the regular form, thus creating more irregularity (ibid.: 35).

The final study of irregular verbs in Hundt’s book (1998: 36–8) examines the participle form gotten. In this case, American English has retained an archaic form which persists despite prescriptivist forces advocating the use of got (ibid.: 36). Hundt found very little evidence that this particular Americanism has made any significant headway in NZE: of the eight tokens of gotten in the NZE newspaper corpus, five are quoted direct speech of Americans (ibid.: 37). Gotten was not found to be any more common in spoken than written language, though teenagers rated it as acceptable more than adults (ibid.).

Thus, Hundt raises the question whether or not the youth of 1990s will retain the form as adults (ibid.: 38), a question for which I am seeking to provide an answer in this thesis.

Quinn (1999: 179–80) postulates that the choice of participle form for verbs with variant -t or -ed ending is governed by phonology and duration of the event in question.

According to Quinn (ibid.), Hundt’s results indicate that NZE shows a marked preference for -t over -ed with verbs ending in /l/. For the study at hand, this would predict a strong preference for irregular forms with spoil, spell, and smell. Verbs ending in nasal sounds /m/ or /n/, on the contrary, are predicted by Quinn (ibid.) to prefer -ed to -t, with the degree of regularity lessening if the stem vowel of the verb is /ɜ/. This indicates a preference for the regular ending for lean and dream, with learn and burn showing less of a regular preference. However, Quinn (ibid.) does note that previous studies such Hundt (1998) have focused on written rather than spoken language. (This is true of corpus linguistics in general.) This complicates matters because some English speakers spell and pronounce participial endings differently: /t/ is a common ending in speech even for verbs that are commonly spelled with -ed (Quinn 1999: 179). Regarding duration, Quinn (ibid.: 179–

80) notes that events which take place over a short period of time tend towards the irregular, as in the following example from Bauer (1987):

(5) “When the flame caught, the curtains burnt immediately.”

On the other hand, events lasting a longer time tend to result in higher proportions of irregular forms (example from Bauer (ibid.)):

(6) “The fire burned for hours.”

The influence of syntactic function (adjectival or participial) on the choice of verb form has been studied by both Hundt and Bauer with inconclusive results: some verbs are more regular as adjectives than as participles and vice versa (Quinn 1999: 180).