The formation of the preterite and the past participle

Introduction The variation in preterite and past participle forms of verbs such as burn , dream , leap and spell is one of the most cited morphological differences between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). It is mentioned as a regional feature in standard grammars such as Jespersen (1942: 32, 38), Quirk et al . (1985: 105–7) and Biber et al . (1999: 396–8), and handbooks such as Kovecses (2000: 190), Tottie (2002a: 150–1) and Trudgill and Hannah (2002: 56). Tottie (2002a: 150–1) summarizes the regional differences by stating that, although there is variation in both varieties, -ed is ‘[m]ore American’ and -t ‘[m]ore British’. Representative instances are seen in (1) to (4): David Ginola once dreamed of displaying his skills in a major European city beginning with B. ( The Independent 2000) Whoever dreamt up the idea of five-day Test cricket clearly had too much time on their hands. ( The Independent 2000) AT&T's stock price leaped $6.125, or 11 percent, on Mr. Allen's news. ( New York Times 1995) And sugar leapt 41 percent. ( New York Times 1995) In the following the term regular will be used for verb forms ending in - ed and irregular for verbs ending in - t , in spite of the irregular verbs having several characteristics in common with regulars.