{"id":1440,"date":"2022-08-01T18:30:40","date_gmt":"2022-08-01T18:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1440"},"modified":"2023-06-19T14:38:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T18:38:24","slug":"defectivity-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Defectivity in English"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

English lexical verbs can have up to 5 distinct forms, and I am aware of just a few English verbs which are defective. (The following are all my personal judgments.)<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I can use begone <\/em>as an imperative, though it has the form of a past participle (cf. gone<\/em> and\u00a0forgone<\/em>). Is BEGO even a verb lexeme anymore?<\/li>\n
  2. Fodor (1972), following Lakoff (1970 [1965]), notes that BEWARE has a limited distribution and never bears explicit inflection. For me, it can occur only as a positive imperative (e.g., beware the dog!<\/em>), with or without emphatic do<\/em>. I agree with Fodor that it is also bad under negation, but perhaps for unrelated reasons: e.g., *don’t beware…\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. FORGO lacks a simple past: forgo, forgoes,<\/em> and forgoing<\/em> are fine, as is the past participle forgone<\/em>, but *forwent<\/em> is bad as the preterite\/simple past, and *forgoed<\/em> is perhaps a bit worse.<\/li>\n
  4. METHINK can only be used in the 3sg. present active indicative form\u00a0methinks<\/em>, and doesn’t allow for an explicit subject.<\/li>\n
  5. STRIDE lacks a past participle (e.g., Hill 1976:668, Pinker 1999:136f., Pullum and Wilson 1977:770): *stridden\u00a0<\/em>is bad.\u00a0 The simple past strode\u00a0<\/em>cannot be reused here, and I cannot use the regular *strided <\/em>(under the relevant sense).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    References<\/h1>\n

    Fodor, J. D. 1972. Beware.\u00a0Linguistic Inquiry\u00a0<\/em>3: 528-534.
    \nHill, A. A. 1976. [Obituary:] Albert Henry Marckwardt. Language<\/em> 52: 667-681.
    \nLakoff, G. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax<\/em>. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
    \nPinker, S. 1999. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language<\/em>. Basic Books.
    \nPullum, G. K. and Wilson, D. 1977. Autonomous syntax and the analysis of auxiliaries. Language<\/em> 53:741-788.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies.] English lexical verbs can have up to 5 distinct forms, and I am aware of just a few English verbs which are defective. (The following are all my personal judgments.) I can use begone as an imperative, though it has the form … Continue reading “Defectivity in English”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defectivity","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1787,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions\/1787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}