Preface and thanks

Summary

While tense and aspect in general have always interested me since my days as a student at the Free University Berlin and a class on the topic by Ekkehartd König, my interest in the non-standard past tense arose purely coincidentally. I was asked to write an overview of the morphology and syntax of the South East of England (Anderwald 2004), when — in the pursuit of some little-documented feature — I fell to reading whole texts from our corpus FRED from this area, especially those from London, noting down rather informally all non-standard features I came across. Many questions that this article raised could not be answered immediately, but I thought they deserved a more thorough investigation. In particular, the many and varied non-standard past tense forms had never been investigated in their regional extension, and I had the feeling that this would make a satisfying research topic.