Re: USAGE : English past tense and participle in -et

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> I'm surprised - though I guess I oughtn't be by now - that this is
> at all debatable.  The word "alot" is quite clearly a contraction of
> "a lot" which is the indefinite article plus the noun "lot", which
> can be replaced by synonyms such as "bunch" (often "whole bunch"),
> "_____load" with many options for the blank, both obscene and not,
> "great deal", etc.  This is true in both the adjectival ("There sure
> are a whole bunch of those things, aren't there?") and adverbial
> ("I love you a whole bunch!") senses.
>
> Where does any doubt about this come from??
I believe myself to have good reasons to believe that to considerable numbers
of natives, "alot" is monolexemic. They may be more-or-less aware id derives
from a contraction of "a lot", but don't feel it to be synchronically a two-
word phrase. The best evidence for this the prevalence of the spaceless
spelling itself - I find it hard to believe it would take on in defiance of
prescriptionist spelling norms if users did not feel it to be one word.

                                                         Andreas