Re: USAGE: Weird dialectal stuff

raccoon@ELKNET.NET wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> > Behalf Of Christophe Grandsire
> > Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 9:41 AM
> > To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> > Subject: Re: Weird dialectal stuff
>
> >         It makes me think of a strange feature of my spoken
> > English (second
> > language of course). I happen to use constructions like "I didn't made"
> > instead of "I didn't make", that's to say I repeat the past on the
> > auxiliary and the main verb. I use that nearly only with my boyfriend (who
> > makes the same mistake by the way). My question is: does such a feature
> > happen in a dialect of English, somewhere in the world, or not at all? It
> > happened to me so naturally that I would be surprised if it didn't appear
> > anywhere in the world with first-language English speakers.
>
> Christophe, the only example I can think of like this is with the phrase
> "used to." A lot of people treat that phrase as inconjugable (is that a
> word? :) ), thus to negate it they said "didn't used to" -- used the past
> tense "didn't" as well as the past tense "used." But then again, it's very
> hard to distinguish between "didn't used to" and "didn't USE to," which I
> would assume to be the correct form. The only real way to tell is if they're
> speaking very carefully or slowly.
I think that's the main problem.  You could say with just as much probability
that what would normally be a /z/ in <use> assimilates in voicing to the
voicelessness of the following /t/, so that <used to> and <use to> become
homophones, at least in the context of this habitualizing helping verb (not
as in e.g. "that's a tool you use to dig with").  Personally, I feel that <used to>
no longer really operates as a helping verb plus <to>, but rather has been
grammaticalized, for most people, to a simple <usta> /ju:st@/.  Something
similar has happened in my speech, whereby I would normally say "could'na"
for "could not have":  /ai kUdn@ gAn/ = "I could not have gone".

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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