CHAPTER ONE MORPHOLOGY 19 Name Section Date 1,07 INCREASING VOCABULARY: 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 pin 1. How do the A-verbs form their past tense? 2. How do the B-verbs form their past tense? B. Here are some brand-new, just-coined English verbs, with definitions and examples: bive “gulp down’ (rhymes with give) Why do you always bive your food? vake ‘have someone vacation’ I think I'm going to vake my mother in Tahoe this year. slike ‘attend only the last half of a class, lecture, concert, etc.” ‘You shouldn't slike math so often. deak “have a strong feeling of distaste or revulsion’ I deak whenever I hear him sing.20 LOOKING AT LANGUAGES mide ‘pour honey over’ He usually mides his pancakes. strink ‘drive a vehicle within the speed limit’ ‘You'd better start strinking—here comes the Highway Patrol! lin “stare with narrowed, accusing eyes" Don’t you lin at me like that! 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. + anative speaker of English + a “civilian””—ic., not a linguistics student, language major, ete. Your job is to elicit the past-tense forms of the “new” verbs from your informant. The way not to do this is to say something like “Here’s a new verb—bive. It means ‘gulp down’ What’s the past tense?” Rather, try to elicit the desired forms as naturally as possible. Besides, you can’t expect your informant necessarily to know the meaning of ‘verb’ or ‘past tense,’ So 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 at noon?” Informant replies, “Yes, I ate lunch at noon” Try your informant out on a few random verbs, such as eat, take, walk, go, hit, beg. Make sure this is proceeding smoothly before going on to the next step. (You will probably want to work with a prepared “script” rather than trying to ask questions extemporaneously.) 2. Now teach your informant each “new” verb 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 your dinner last night?” Informant replies, “Yes, I my dinner last night.” Remember—we are interested in speech. The entire experiment is to be conducted orally. Do not let your informant sce anything written, and do not spell the words—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,CHAPTER ONE MORPHOLOGY a Name Section Date cord here all the past-tense forms you get. Verb Past-Tense Form Elicited bive vake slike deak mide strink lin 3. (@) Summarize the results of your experiment.22, LOOKING AT LANGUAGES (b) A productive process in a language is one that is “alive” in the sense 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” and “B-type.” (©) Ithas been proposed that the strong (“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 your experiment? Explain.