2 - Past tense theories

Summary

Like fruit flies, regular and irregular verbs are small and easy to breed, and they contain, in an easily visible form, the machinery that powers larger phenomena in all their glorious complexity.

(Pinker 1999: ix)

No-one has ever dreamed of a universal morphology, for it is clear that actually found formatives, as well as their functions and importance, vary from language to language to such an extent that everything about them must be reserved for special grammars.

(Jespersen 1924: 52)

Introduction

After the short descriptive overview in the previous chapter, this chapter will concentrate on the role of weak vs. strong past tense formation in various theoretical frameworks. Indeed, past tense formation has served and is serving as the test case for or against individual theoretical constructions, and this fact already merits a closer look at the various theories. In turn, different theories may make different predictions about what to expect in non-standard tense paradigms, and new observations from non-standard past tense paradigms in the remainder of the book may support or revise specific theories.

Although the systematic study of morphology goes back at least to Indian linguists like Panini (ca. fifth or sixth century BC), this tradition has not had a great impact on Western theorizing (although, as we shall see, some ideas have — without acknowledgement — found their way into generative theories).