Re: (In)transitive verbs

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 08:37:14PM -0500, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> Whether a system is internally regular doesn't mean it's externally
> regular. All the class N weak verbs might behave the same way, but taken
> in the broader picture of English verbs, they're not regular because they
> don't form their past/pp. with -ed. (Note of course that -ed has at least
> three pronunciations, so it's not that they all share a single
> pronunciation that's important.)
Yup.  There is ample evidence that the underlying form is the same for all
uses of -ed, but the sound is modified by a sort of phonological
postprocessing step between the formation and transmission of the utterance.

-Mark