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Chapter 1 Literature Review

This chapter provides a review of the previous studies related to our researchsubject. This chapter consists of two sections. Section one reviews the general studies ofEnglish irregular verbs, including their origins, classification and rules of theirformation. Section two describes the studies about diachronic and synchronic variationsof English irregular verbs.

1.1 General Studies of English Irregular Verbs
Verbs in English are divided into two categories based on the different inflectionsadded to their PTFs. The ones that form preterits by adding a dental suffix -ed, such aswalk/walked, are the regular verbs in English. Those forming preterits without addingsuffix -ed are the irregular ones, such as sing/sang. The latter in particular arouseslinguists’ interest. They usually focus on the origin, historical development,classification and formulating rules of the irregular verbs.The history of the irregular verbs can be traced back to the period at least 5500years ago of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (Pinker, 1999: 80). In other words,the irregular verbs have their roots in PIE language. In PIE, ablaut, that is, the vowelalternations occurred in words was a frequent language phenomenon. Later, the ablautof the verbs started to indicate the grammatical meaning of past as the tense marker. Infact, the ablaut or vowel-alternation forms are regarded as the ancestors of the strongverbs (Pinker, 1999: 81). English language evolves with the passage of time. When itcomes to the Old English period, the verbs were divided into two major subclasses: the“strong” and the “weak” verbs, the predecessors of the irregular and regular verbsrespectively. Strong and weak verbs differ in their past-tense formations. Strong verbsget the past tense by altering their root vowels, such as drive/drove. However, weakverbs like talk (talk/talked) generate preterits just by adding a regular suffix.The strong and weak verbs also differ in their numbers. In terms of sheer numbers,the weak verbs outnumber the strong ones. In Old English, the total number of thestrong verbs is a little more than 300 without counting the compounds (Baugh & Cable,2002: 54), while in Modern English the number of the strong verbs (or the irregularverbs) is reduced to 164 (Pinker, 1999: 80).Apparently, irregular verbs or the strong verbs are quite different from the regularor the weak ones. The irregulars seem to be the exceptions in terms of the standardgrammar. In consequences, these exceptions have aroused interests of some linguists,who have attempted to classify the irregular verbs into different categories and to findout the patterns behind each category.
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1.2 Studies of the Variations of Irregular Verbs
Just as Bauer (1997) once comments, “Irregular verbs are notoriously unstable inGermanic languages.” English irregular verbs have inherited this feature as well. Inother words, variation occurs when it comes to the irregular verbs in English. In fact,“variation can be synchronic or diachronic. (Baker, 2010:4)” As Baker (2010:5) says,diachronic change12of language is a gradual rather than sudden process, occurring overdecades.The situation is the same when it comes to the diachronic change of the irregularverbs. Many historical linguists have noticed there is a general change happening to thePTFs of irregular verbs. Some of them believe that the irregular verbs are going