Re: (In)transitive verbs

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 01:01:39AM +0000, Jack Ketch wrote:
> Well, of course! That's what they're taught! - and they could
> as well be taught that these verbs are "green" and those verbs
> are "blue" for the sense that makes! That's what I was taught.
> I wasn't taught the strong/weak distinction until I got into college
> and began looking at Germanic grammars! The Germanic grammars
> immediately made sense.
You're missing a fundamental point that both I and John have tried to
make.  The -ed formation of past indicative and participle in English is
the regular form not because some prescriptivist authors have labeled it
such, but because scientific research has determined that it is the
regular form *for English speakers*.  Not only do most verbs have that
form (not a requirement for regularity, but a helpful tidbit), but
application of -ed is the *only* rule that is actually *used* as a rule,
in real-time by speakers, as they speak.  *All* other verb forms, no
matter what pattern they fall into, are memorized; the association is
arbitrary, and forming "drank/drunk" from "drink" is no less work than
forming "was/been" from "be", even if the pattern helps in the initial
memorization.  This has been demonstrated in many
experiments, is based on different kinds of observations, including
types of speech errors and the amount of time required to produce a
verb form.

-Mark

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