Irregular -t and Regular -ed Forms of Preterit/Past Participle in BrE and AmE : Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the difference in distribution of regular –ed and irregular –t forms of preterit and past participle based on corpus data. The main hypotheses addressed in this paper are : a) verbs with double forms(as in burnt/burned) will show distributional difference, b) there is a common ground that can be applied to all –ed/-t variants. The paper has been divided into four parts : historical change, text type, grammar, and semantic difference. The main verbs for this study are dream, dwell, leap, and smell. The details are studies with data from COCA, COHA, and BNC.