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I have come across some American media (The Alternate History Hub youtube channel comes to mind) in which the perfect participle and the simple-past form have been merged.

For example, we would have:

  • "We've driven there before" -> "We've drove there before"
  • "I would've sunk" -> "I would've sank"
  • "I've swum that distance before" -> "I've swam that distance before"

As far as I can tell, the replacement of the perfect with the simple past is consistent in this dialect, rather than just applying to some verbs (Edit in response to commment: with perhaps the exception of "to be" - "I have was ill" sounds odd enough that it would have really stood out).

Is this a feature of some American dialects? If so then in which? How common is this feature?

Related question (@sumelic): Is the past participle becoming obsolete? (I have went)

Att Righ
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    It isn't a past participle. "Past participle" is just another name for "perfect participle". The forms here are all simple past tense forms of irregular verbs. With regular verbs like walk, merge, or publish, the simple past tense form is identical with the past participle form, and some idiolects (and some dialects) simply generalize the perfect construction to use the past tense form, since it's identical to the perfect participle in most cases. Viz: in He has often walked there, walked could be either past or perfect participle; you can't tell which one the speaker intends. – John Lawler May 21 '18 at 02:52
  • It isn't a past participle Yes, I did kind of make up the phrase simple past participle to distinguish, for example, "ran" from "run" . simple past form then? I shall update the question appropriately. Is there a good source for standard grammatical nomenclature like this? since it's identical to the perfect participle in most cases indeed. That's the question - is this common in many dialects and which. – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 03:02
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    I'm not sure I agree with John Lawler's statement "It isn't a past participle". In any case, there is a very old tendency to level the past participle and past tense forms that has affected different dialects to greater or lesser degrees. Related question: Is the past participle becoming obsolete? (I have went) – herisson May 21 '18 at 03:02
  • @sumelic: you can call it a past participle because it's used in a perfect construction, and may indicate general fusion of the two forms in a lect. But that's just swapping definitions. – John Lawler May 21 '18 at 03:04
  • @JohnLawler: Right; I think it's a matter of analysis. Even though Att Righ says the replacement seems consistent, it seems possible that the speakers might still have distinct forms for at least a few very frequent verbs that are otherwise irregular, like "been", and maybe "done". – herisson May 21 '18 at 03:05
  • Is the past participle becoming obsolete? (I have went) Thanks for the link. I missed that question! This question is a little different: there seem to be some idiolects (and I believe dialects) that aggressively merge the perfect and simple past and I want to know which dialects and how much they are used. The other question focuses more on the gradual and ongoing merging of the two. – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 03:20
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    In the UK, such constructions (I have drove I would have sank I have swam) do occur in various parts of the country but I have always assumed they are just incorrect uses of English and not dialectical. – Nigel J May 21 '18 at 04:54
  • "Is this a feature of some American dialects? If so then in which? How common is this feature?" -- too broad! – Kris May 21 '18 at 06:47
  • "We've drove there before" -- using *their is an error of Americanism. – Kris May 21 '18 at 06:50
  • @Kris there :P boring! (and fixed)! People make mistakes when they are racking their brains for examples... who knew. – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 13:52
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    In some dialects, there are really alternate past participles that are the same as the past tense (like I've took). But it really does look like there are some people who use past tenses instead of past participles in present perfect. See Ngram. – Peter Shor May 21 '18 at 13:58
  • @Kris too broad. I don't really know how one thinks about breadth. I guess one measure is the length of a required answer. Perhaps the fact that every person has their own idiolect and every group its own dialect means that a complete answer requires an awful lot of information. On the other hand, the the answer could be "Very common in X, Y, Z. Virtually unseen elsewhere". It might be interesting to compare this question to something like "Where do German-speaking people only use the perfect tense?" a complicated question, but knowing that this happens in Austria might be useful. – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 14:09
  • @PeterShor Regarding the Ngram: How interesting.... it looks like a feature that existed in the 1800s hundred but then mostly died off in the 1900s: perhaps as a result of the normalising effect of media (newspapers and radio). Look how similar the graphs for "took vs taken" and "drove vs driven" are. This seems like a good approach for looking at this question, with caveats about spoken language. I'd note that "I've ate" seems to have been comparatively far less used than "I've drove" - who knows what that means! – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 14:32
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    And "I've threw" is so rare that it doesn't even show up on the Ngrams. (Although Googling finds plenty of examples.) – Peter Shor May 21 '18 at 16:35
  • If one asks about "which dialects", one really needs to commission a sociolinguistic survey. There is no other way to determine an accurate answer. For one thing, dialects are not distinct from one another, and there is vast individual variation, so one can't just check boxes on a list. Half a million dollars would probly do it OK. – John Lawler May 21 '18 at 19:41
  • Half a million dollars would probly do it OK :) . Or you might be able to leverage someone else's half a million dollars :) (so close). You have quite good data on things like "y'all" – Att Righ May 21 '18 at 20:03
  • Here's the point: if you speak like that, it marks you re certain social levels. That said, it is not just American English. The problem is that there is so much of it in the States, one can mistakenly get the impression it is dialectal. That said, this is exactly like that have went/have gone question: You either speak in an uneducated way or you don't. Both are learned at home. Linguistically, neither is more valid than the other. *But a single form on its own does not make a dialect. It would have to be accompanied by other speech features to be a dialect.* – Lambie Jul 09 '18 at 19:00
  • For example, it would have to be accompanied by other features of speech such as using double negatives. Then, you can talk about a "dialect". And it surprises me that the honchos here fail to point that out. An "educated" middle class speaker who uses those has not made the class jump. It stands out in the ears of those who are in a higher class or who have become part of a higher class. Higher class=more educated. – Lambie Jul 09 '18 at 19:02
  • @Kris How is "their" for "there" an Americanism? – Acccumulation Dec 15 '20 at 19:18
  • @JohnLawler "It isn't a past participle." What isn't? ""Past participle" is just another name for "perfect participle"." No, perfect participle is having+past participle. "The forms here are all simple past tense forms of irregular verbs." Driven is simple past tense? – Acccumulation Dec 15 '20 at 19:20

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This is happening in many places. I live in Southern California (LA metro area), and I hear it all the time. I work in a law office, and I hear licensed attorneys do it occasionally without blinking an eye. One day I even heard two attorneys say "saw" instead of "seen", as in "I've never saw that before". Those attorneys were born and raised in the Los Angeles metro area and had college-educated, English-speaking parents. (I am originally from northern Missouri, and I did not hear this from educated speakers while growing up.)

"drove" instead of "driven", "went" instead of "gone", "broke" instead of "broken", "ran" instead of "run" - that's just a small list of what I hear on a regular basis even from educated speakers in Los Angeles. If I see this error in a foreign language dub, I know the translator is from California. It's also very common to find the simple-past substitution in online forums and comments sections if you look for it, although it's obviously harder to pinpoint the contributor's region.

I believe that this is an inevitable change in the language that we can watch in real time as it occurs. The rule is easily internalized as it follows the regular verbs' pattern of using the same form for both the simple past and the past participle. As far as I can tell, American schools don't teach the formal conjugations of English verbs and tense/aspect combinations, so there isn't really a institution working to preserve those irregular past participles in the language.

Aaron C
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This is common in parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky that I'm aware of. It's not exactly a regional dialect, as it's restricted to small towns, neighborhoods, or even individual families rather than an identifiable socio-geographical region. My theory is that this sort of dying-off of distinct word forms through replacement happens when speakers do not perceive any negative social pressure from peers regarding their lazy word usage. Usually this requires limited diversity in social interaction, which explains its persistence in rural and isolated areas. It's also possible with a particularly self-assured or easy-going culture. For instance:

Don't let nobody make ya feel less fer usin' yer words. If yer meaning's took, it don't make no never-mind.

To be clear, it is totally fine to speak this way in America. Anyone would understand, and most would not be surprised. The most common supposition people may make when hearing someone speak this way is that the speaker did not participate in formal education, but I've heard some of these idiosyncrasies persist in the speech of college graduates. Breaking a habit requires significant internal pressure.

Zeal
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    It is totally fine to speak however you speak, in America and elsewhere. But you won't get a job on CNN talking like that, or at a university or ladeedah law firm, etc. etc. etc. It marks the speaker as being uneducated at some level. – Lambie Jul 09 '18 at 19:06
  • @Lambie, I think you'll find that the sectors of industry that bar entry to those of limited institutionalized education are of very little import. Academia has never produced anything other than intriguing argument. The effective application of functionally valuable knowledge is often completely independent of your ability to speak. On the other hand, my meaning was that the importance of speech is communication, and I find it unlikely that the particular brand of American dialect I was trying to illustrate would be understood in other English-speaking nations. – Zeal Jul 10 '18 at 04:07
  • Right, whatever. Those were just examples in my comment. A single speech feature cannot be used to say a person is speaking a dialect. Unfortunately, it does not matter what you think; it is the way of the world, as the playwright noted. In the US and elsewhere in other languages. The example you gave is indeed dialectal. It contains at least 7 features that make it so. – Lambie Jul 10 '18 at 12:32
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As quite a few native speakers of English do not have to care about the fact that – in other languages – adjectives and past participles agree with nouns, they are not too good (or, shall we say... helpless!) at grammatical analysis!

They only need to worry about agreement between verb and subject, and even this proves a bit tricky for a lot of them in cases where the subject is not the word immediately before the verb, or – in a question – after the auxiliary verb.

French: Aucun de mes amis n'a de voiture. = English: None of my friends has/have (?) a car.

The verb 'have' should agree with 'none', singular (like 'every one of my friends'), not with 'my friends', plural.

Now, to the point: with regular verbs – and quite a few irregular verbs as well (think/thought/thought, meet/met/met, win/won/won, etc.) – the past simple is no different from the past participle; so, when you form the perfect tenses (have/has thought, had thought, will have thought, would have thought) it is NOT OBVIOUS that you are using the past participle of a verb and not its past simple, if you do not know or care about the difference! To some, learning the past simple of irregular verbs must seem work enough, so they let their past participle alone!

user58319
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