Lieselotte Anderwald: The Morphology of English Dialects: Verb-formation in Non-Standard English

• Heinrich Ramisch

The book under review presents an analysis of past-tense forms in nonstandard varie ties of British English by including both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. In contrast to the ordinary definition in English historical linguistics the terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verb are used differently in this study. The term ‘strong verb’ is employed in a much wider sense, which includes both verbs with vowel gradation as well as any other irregular verb. Accordingly, ‘strong verb’ not only designates historically strong verbs but also historically weak verbs with a vowel mutation in the past (e.g. teach – taught). The term ‘weak verb’ is restricted to verbs that mark their past-tense form only with an inflectional suffix (<-ed>) without changing the quality of the stem vowel (e.g. knowed or growed).

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