Don’t Cry Over Spilled or Spilt Milk?: Nuanced Semanto-Pragmatic Differences Between -ed and -t in English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern English has a small set of verbs that show variability between the inflections -ed and ­-t as preterite and past participle morphemes (Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970). Examples include: burn, spoil, spill, learn, dream, spell, smell, kneel, dwell, leap, and lean (Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970). While -ed is thought to be the more prevalent form in U.S. Englishes, -t is more widespread in U.K. dialects of English (as related to both preterite and perfect forms) (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2023; HarperCollins, 2023). However, in spite of this difference being regularly deemed dialectal (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2023; HarperCollins, 2023), according to some scholars (e.g., Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970), choice between one form or the other may carry semantic consequences. For instance, whereas -ed in participial contexts may be understood as representing imperfective actions, -t might be associated with perfectivity (Quirk, 1970). With this in mind, the present paper had as its objective to further explore the meaning differences that may come about with the use of either inflection. In the sections to come, I add to the aforementioned discussion by pointing out that, in adjectival environments, the aspectual differences between the two can be analogized as the PLIANT and INTERRUPTIBLE (-ed) vs. the NON-COMPLIANT and TERMINAL (-t). I explain that, while -ed tends to be interpreted as being tied to modifiable or malleable events, -t is read as signaling those which are fixed or unyielding. The findings to be discussed are significant for several reasons: 1) they shed light on the contexts in which each inflected form may be preferred; 2) very few academic works acknowledge any differences, other than regional preference; and 3) to my knowledge, no previous scholarly article has focused on their uses in exclusively, adjectival environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.244 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".