CHAT: Nonstandard usage (was Natural language change (was Re:Charlie and I))

Eric Christopherson wrote:

> But then she prefers "sneaked" to "snuck" ;O)
Really. My mother always strikes me as speaking somehow more
dialectally than I do.  For her, the principle parts of "wake" are
"wake, waked, waked", while I always say "wake, woke, woken".
She also has funny vowels [ :) ] before /r/:  for her, <cord> is /kOrd/, not
/kord/, as it is for me.

> Re: preterit vs. perfect, I think "did you do your homework" sounds
> perfectly appropriate, and "have you done your homework" is ok too (but it
> sounds a bit formal).
But the question was not about "Did you do your homework?";  that
is also perfectly normal for me to say.  What I was getting at was that
use of "yet" to take on the full load of the perfectivity:  I find it odd
when someone says "Did you do your homework *yet*?"

> However, it really annoys me to hear people use the
> perfect tense where one would usually use the past tense, e.g. there was a
> commercial where a woman said something like "Tony's been my dentist since
> I've been a child." AARGH!! :)
Well, that's wrong because she's no longer a child, but the verb form seems
to imply that she could still be (the present perfect talks about past events
but
only in how they affect the present -- hence "I've been a child" implies that
childishness of some kind is still a relevant characteristic at the present
time).
This example is exactly parallel to mine above.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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