Epicentral effects on ‐ed/‐tinflectional variation in Australasian Englishes 1850–2020

Abstract

Abstract This research examines the possibility of epicentral influence of AusE on NZE, focusing on morphosyntactic variation over 170 years in verb inflections (‐ed/‐t) for the past tense/participles of a set of 12 verbs includingburn,learn,spell,spoil. To obtain a diachronic perspective on them in Australasian Englishes we use historical data from 19th‐ and 20th‐century corpora, and 21st‐century data from the NOW corpus of online news. Most verbs show increasing use of‐tforms in AusE from the 19th to 20th century, and an increase in NZE in the later 20th century, which could be construed as epicentral influence from west to east. But in 21st‐century data from NOW, the‐ed/‐tbalance shifts to‐edin both Australasian varieties for eight out of 12 verbs. The fact that ‐tusage on some remains higher in contemporary NZE than AusE suggests a kind of epicentral lag.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.