Re: USAGE: Weird dialectal stuff

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>         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.
>
>         Anyway, tell me what you know :) .
I haven't done an empirical study on this, but my experience with this kind
of phenomenon has been exclusively with Romance speakers (à la: *"He must
has been."). I've heard this sort of thing with French, Spanish, and Italian
speakers of English, but not with Chinese, Japanese, or German speakers, and
never with native speakers. Don't know what it all means. While I can
understand where the mistake is coming from and the logic behind it, I am
skeptical that native English speaker intuition would consider this
construction "natural" (you yourself described it as "strange"), and would
myself be surprised if native speakers anywhere (excluding, perhaps, those
of pidgins or creoles) allowed it. Of course, I could be wrong. Those who
know better, please elucidate.

Enjoying being back on the list and now in Boston environs, I am

Kou