1 - Introduction

Summary

But it was in the verbal conjugation that the Ablaut found its peculiar home, and there it took formal and methodical possession.

(Earle 1892: §124)

The past tense — a descriptive approach

PAST is the most frequently marked verbal category by far (e.g. according to Sampson 2002, based on figures from the British National Corpus), accounting for around 25 per cent of all verb forms in contemporary spoken British English. In comparison, the two next categories, negation or modals, both only account for roughly 12 per cent of verb forms, the perfect for around 8 per cent, and the progressive for under 6 per cent. The passive finally is at best marginal with a text probability of under 1 per cent.

Past tense formation in English appears to be a very simple matter. Nevertheless — or perhaps because of this simplicity — great theoretical significance has been attached to an analysis of the past tense because it is used as the prime example in a long-standing debate in morphological theory (more on which in Chapter 2).

Putting it in simple descriptive terms (although no description is of course theory-free, or truly pre-theoretical), the majority of English verbs today have past tense forms that consist of the present tense stem plus <-ed>.