Introduction

In this chapter, a range of seemingly quite different verbs will be discussed. They have in common that they are non-standard strong verbs with paradigms consisting of just two forms, while their standard English counterparts consists of three forms, e.g. drink — drunk — drunk vs. StE drink — drank — drunk; see — seen — seen vs. StE see — saw — seen; do — done — done vs. StE do — did — done and eat — eat — eaten vs. StE eat — ate — eaten. Two of these example paradigms are part of larger patterns: drink — drunk — drunk is what I will term a ‘Bybee’ verb, and there are a host of other verbs behaving like drunk, as section 5.2 will show.