A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

274 Chapter 16 Morphology: words and lexemes

of the base (it rhymes with buzz, not booze). The same applies to says (as we noted

in connection with [Si], for most speakers it rhymes withfez, notfaze).

The choice between ·es and the default alternant ·s has been described in §3.4.

A sample of forms is given in [14]:

[1 4] LEXICAL BASE miss

miss·es

lose

los·es

touch go boo stop

ii 3RD SING PRESENT touch·es go·es boo·s stop·s

4.3 The preterite and past participle
We take these two forms together, since for all regular verbs and a high
proportion of irregular ones they are morphologically identical - they share exactly
the same shape. Where they share shape we'll simplify tabular presentations by giv­
ing only the preterite form, but when the past participle is different we'll show it
separately.

Regular forms

We begin with verbs whose preterite and past participle are regular in speech. In
writing, these are formed by the addition of the suffix ·ed, with consonant doubling,
e deletion and replacement of y by i applying as described in §§3.1-3.3. Examples
are given in [15]:

[^1 5] LEXICAL BASE

11 PRETERITE

laugh stop prefe r hope

laugh·ed stopp·ed preferr·ed hop·ed

subdue

subdu·ed

deny

deni·ed

Irregular forms with preterite and past participle identical

Many irregular verbs are like regular ones in having shape sharing between preterite
and past participle. There are a dozen or so where there is variation between a reg­
ular form and a mildly irregular one, as with spell, whose preterite can be spelled or
spelt.
We find a considerable range of morphological relations between the preterite /
past participle and the lexical base. A sample of these are illustrated in [16], with
commentary given below:

[16] A B C D E F G

BASE hit bend burn keep flee think dig

11 PRETERITE hit bent burnt kept fled thought dug

Type A. Preterite identical with base

There are over twenty verbs where the preterite is identical with the lexical
base. Most of them have bases ending in t, but there are also a few in d, such
as shed. Some lexemes, such as quit, have variant regular forms: He quit or He
quilted.

H

stand

stood