Increasingly, I’ve been noticing that in regular verbs ending in /-t/, which should take the /-ed/ suffix in the past tense, many people just use the root verb, same as in the present. It may also be happening with verbs in /-d/, though I can’t think of any native speaker examples right now.
In the past, I’ve often heard if from certain ESL speakers, generally East Asian ones whose own languages don’t use tenses, and that’s something you would naturally expect. But now I hear it from native speakers, often from professionals speaking in the media. I haven’t really seen it in writing yet, however.
Come to think of it, it may be possible to argue that the last vestiges of English inflection are under “assault”, though what from I’m not sure. Three-way irregular verbs–the kind with separate vowel gradations for present, simple past, and past perfect, like shrink/shrank/shrunk, seem already to have simplified to two forms, almost universally. So now it’s “shrunk” for both simple past and past perfect. “Drink” seems to have gone the other way and I would bet a majority of native speakers would now tend to “follow” the drink/drank/drank pattern. (Not that they follow intentionally, but you know what I mean.) And a big one now is when an irregular verb uses the same vowel in the present and past perfect tenses, like “come” and “run”. Constructions like “have came”, “have ran”, and “have ate” were once the mark of the low-brow, but now are commonly heard in public discourse.
And then there are the abuse scandals in all of those Catholic “dio-sees”…ahhrrrrgh! All this is like nails on chalkboard to me; I can’t help it!
I don’t know exactly what you mean about your first examples. Perhaps that means I’ve never heard them.
For the rest, I don’t hear it any more than I ever have. I’ve lived in central Illinois and in north central Indiana for the last 35 years or so, and that’s the way many of the people there talk. Hearing it does make me shudder, though. I also don’t like needs X. For example, that shed needs painted.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about with “assault” and “text”. Can you give example sentences that you’ve heard?
All I can say about this is to ask you if you find it equally annoying when you hear people speaking Japanese? If not, why does it bother you when people speak in a dialect of English that differs slightly from your own? Of course it’s true that we all find the conventions of our own particular place and time the most natural. But there’s something deeper going that bears careful reflection when you claim the level of distress that you assert when other people’s speech does not conform to your own norms.
Something like, “she was assault while jogging,” I have not heard. It could be that I don’t get out enough.
One usage I’ve heard that grates is people saying “verse” instead of “versus.” Really annoying - not the same word at all, rather than just dropping a syllable, which I suspect might be part of the missing “-ed.”
It does get hits on Google, but of course it’s impossible to tell how many of those are typos. I’ve never heard it, so I can’t really offer much insight. AAVE does not do this, so it’s not derived from that.
In learning foreign languages, I was taught and expected to follow the norms. Why should my native language be any different? It’s not that all norms are equally important; we’re probably at one on issues like who versus whom. But there are also variances which, in my opinion, can compromise communication. For instance, if I say “text” (the verb), I mean present tense or infinitive. If I say “texted” I mean past tense, and might also use a word like “yesterday” as appropriate. You might argue that temporal adverb sufficiently communicates the the “past-ness” of the action, so that the /-ed/ ending has become superfluous. But the temporal adjective and tense inflection, used together, are a good example of redundancy. Although in addition to English I know only a few other European languages, I think it’s safe to say that redundancy is a natural part of all languages.
That’s just /t/ elision. A lot of people elide final /t/ after s. Or glottalize it, which may sound like it’s missing to people unfamiliar with it. It has nothing to do with inflections going away.
Well, that sort of sound change, if it becomes common enough, can lead to an actual change in the standard form, because people will fail to hear (perceive) the glottal stop or whatever (as you noted).
Yeah, this is something that a simple Google search can’t handle. (Yes, Virgina, there are such things.) We’re going to need some audio from Spectre, or some recent research, to know if there really is drift going on with this.
Spectre, you say you’ve noticed this “increasingly,” and with “professionals speaking in the media”: can you be more specific about where you’ve heard it? If this is really a case of drift then we should be able to find audio examples.
As for changes in the pronunciation of strong irregular past forms such as drink–that’s pretty much established, but not really related, except that it also involves past tense.
And the pronunciation of diocese–I don’t see what that has to do with either of these, but its inclusion in the OP will more or less guarantee that–as always happens on this message board–this thread will degenerate into random complaints about completely unrelated language “pet peeves,” and someone is sure to come around any minute complaining about apostrophe usage.
I’ll have to listen/watch for specific examples, and then hope to find them online where I can cite them. By “professionals” I mean people whose job it is to speak in public, like news anchors, and to a lesser extent representatives of other milieus like law enforcement when being interviewed or making announcements to the media.
“The cat wants pet.” I’m seeing this, a lot. That is, the use of “pet” where clearly “petted” is called for, as if “pet” is the only tense form. I know I’ve seen better examples than I gave but I be damn if I can find 'em.
Are you hearing this in natural speech, or are you only reading this online? There’s a lot of self-conscious and contrived printed language online that isn’t really natural–especially regarding cats. These aren’t things people go around saying in normal spoken discourse. I think this OP is about real, natural language.