English Because of the many dialects in English, there are multiple ways morphological leveling affects the language.
to be leveling African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and
Appalachian English both exhibit the
to be leveling mentioned above. In AAVE, this kind of leveling can be used to change the semantics of a sentence. When a speaker of this dialect says a phrase like, "I be working when they call," it does not mean the same as "I am working when they call." It means that the speaker is usually working when they receive the phone call. Thus, the leveling of the verb is used to show a recurring event instead of the typical immediate happening of the verb. In more general terms of Appalachian English, speakers will use the past tense form of
to be instead of using the other conjugations of the verb. Thus, sentences like "We was talking" and "They was making a mess" become common in the language. They also make use of a contracted form of the verb
was. These sentences look like "We's out last night." This contracted form differs from the contracted
is form because of the decidedly past tense context of the sentence.
Ablaut leveling An example of ablaut leveling would be the reanalysis of English
strong verbs as
weak verbs, such as
bode becoming
bided and
swoll becoming
swelled. The original strong forms of these and most other leveled verbs are readily understood by modern English speakers but are seldom used. Another example is how for all but a few nouns the original English
plural suffixes stemming from the
Old English weak declension have been replaced by one general plural marker; as late as the 16th century,
shoon was still in use as the plural form of
shoe, but in contemporary English the only acceptable form is
shoes, using the general plural marker
-s.
PPL Historically, English has undergone a few changes in relation to prosodic paradigm leveling. For example, the word ''he'd
in Australian English has experienced an internal leveling in terms of vowels. The original word was pronounced /hid/ (in IPA) in the same way as the word "heed" is pronounced in American English. However, it experienced influence from the weaker form of the word, /hɪd/. Thus, the primary pronunciation of the word became /hɪd/. Another example of this would be the word than
. The word was originally pronounced /ðæːn/. This leveling occurred in terms of trans-paradigmatic leveling. The change in the word stemmed from paradigms like that
(/ðæt) and have
(/hæv/), from which than'' dropped the lengthening of the vowel to become /ðæn/.
Germanic languages In
Germanic Languages, such as
Swedish,
Dutch and
German, ablaut leveling occurs in relation to strong verbs. In the case of Swedish, the
preterite will have a distinct vowel pattern in comparison to the past participle, specifically the preterite. An example of this would be the verb meaning
to write, which is conjugated below: • Infinitive/Present:
skriva • Preterite:
skrev • Past Participle:
skrivit The vowels for the preterite singular and past participle are "e" and "i", respectively. This follows the pattern mentioned above of Swedish keeping the two tenses separate. The leveling comes in with the fact that the other tenses match one or the other of the tenses. In this case, the infinitive/present and preterite plural tenses follow the past participle and use the vowel "i". German and Dutch follow a different pattern, in that the vowels of the preterite singular and past participle are kept the same. However, this is only the favored pattern and certain verbs do deviate from this. In the chart above, both the Dutch and German versions of the verb
to offer keep the vowel of the preterite singular the same as the past participle. However, in the German verb
to find and the Dutch verb
to steal each have a different vowel used in the preterite singular and past participle. == See also ==