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Name__________________________

English Past Tense Productivity Experiment

A. Consider the following pairs of English verbs:

A B

live give

fake take

like strike

leak speak

side ride

link think

sin spin

1. How do the A-verbs form their past tense?_____________________________________

2. How do the B-verbs form their past tense?_____________________________________

B. Here are 7 brand-new, just-coined English verbs, with definitions and examples:

bive ‗drink quickly‘

(rhymes with give) Don‘t bive that coffee—it‘s too hot.

vake ‗plan or think about a vacation‘

If I spent as much time working as vaking, I could afford a vacation.

slike ‗yawn because you are totally bored‘

I hate it when students slike in class.

deak ‗have a strong feeling of annoyance caused by something or someone‘

I deak whenever my room-mate doesn‘t do the dishes.

mide ‗eat with your hands‘

How can you not mide a sandwich?

strink ‗not reply quickly to a message someone sent or left for you‘

He‘s such a jerk. I‘m definitely strinking him.

lin ‗stare into space for a moment‘

Why do you always lin when you‘re supposed to be working?

You are going to conduct some linguistic research, and you will need to find an informant to help

you. Your informant may be anyone at all—a family member, friend, person you meet on the

street—just so long as she or he is:

 at least six years old

 a native speaker of English

 a ―civilian‖—i.e., not a linguistics student, language major, etc.

Your job is to elicit the past-tense forms of our ―new‖ verbs from your informant.

The way not to do this is to say something like, ―Here‘s a new verb—bive. It means ‗drink

quickly.‘ How would form its past tense?‖

1) the person may not be familiar with ‗verb‘ and ‗past tense‘, and more importantly

2) this would not be natural usage. You want to tap into the subconscious past tense formation

rules of your informant (not his or her conscious knowledge about language).

Proceed along the following lines:

1. Teach your informant to play a language game with you. You will ask a question, and he or

she will respond with a ―long‖ answer.

EXAMPLE You say, ―Did you eat lunch today?‖

Informant replies, ―Yes, I ate lunch today?‖

Make a list of 5 to 10 questions using common verbs for things the person has probably done

in the recent past: take, walk, go, sleep, talk, etc. Be sure that all of your questions use the

present tense form of the verb and try to elicit the past tense form. Don‘t use the words verb,

past, present, or tense.

2. Now teach you informant each ―new‖ word in turn. Give the meaning plus an example of its

use. When you are satisfied he or she has grasped the idea, try the question/answer game as

in part 1.

EXAMPLE You say, ―Did you bive anything in the last week?‖

Informant replies, ―Yes, I _____ a Red Bull before class today.‖

Remember, you need to only use the present tense or –ing form of the new words, and the

goal is to find out how the informant will form the past tense—but don‘t let him or her know

that.

Also, we are interested in speech. The entire experiment is to be conducted orally. Do not let

the informant see anything written, and do not spell the words for him or her—just

pronounce them. You may ask your informant to repeat the answer or say it slowly, but you

may not ask him or her to spell anything.

*The only exception to this is for ASL users. You may need to write or finger spell the

words, and your informant (who should be a hearing native English speaker), will need to

write or finger spell their answer. We will use this data for comparison to the rest of the class

who performs the experiment orally.

3. Record here all the past tense forms you elicited from your informant.

Verb Past tense form elicited

bive

vake

slike

deak

mide

strink

lin

4. Summarize the results of your experiment.

5. A productive process in a language is one that is ―alive‖ in the sense that it can be applied to

new forms entering the language. Considering the results of your experiment, comment on

the productivity of the two kinds of past tense formation in English, ―A-type‖ (regular verbs)

and ―B-type‖ (irregular verbs).

6. It has been proposed that the strong (irregular, ―B-type‖) verbs in English form a closed set—

English has a fixed number of such verbs and will never have any more. Is this prediction

borne out by the results of your experiment? Explain.