5.2 Distribution of burnt and burned

Since the aspectual difference is regarded to affect native speakers of British English most, this first analysis will be based on databases of British literature only. In particular, these are the EEPF, ECF and NCF. Unfortunately, the databases offer no POS-tagging or syntactic parsing, which means that the division of the results into past participle and preterite had to be done manually. The results of this analysis can be seen in figure 7.

Figure 7: The distribution of regular and irregular past tense and past participle forms of the verb burn in EEPC, ECF and NCF.

As the graphs show, the percentage of burnt found in a past participle construction is almost always higher than in the preterite. Thus the data supports the claim of extrapolation, because the irregular form is and perhaps always was associated more closely with the past participle. However, if we wanted to confirm the claim about burnt having its origins in the past participle, we would need to recognize a convergent development over time, starting in Middle English when burnt seemingly occurred in the past participle only. Although the databases do not reach back to such early texts, the curves are parallel rather than convergent and show no diachronic change in terms of the division of regular and irregular form into preterite and past participle. Instead, as a matter of fact, the margin between the numbers of the first analysed time span and the last one is 25 per cent, hence roughly the same. This means that up to the earliest time spans that can be scrutinised by means of the databases, burnt has never exclusively been used for the past participle form, but always for the preterite as well. Moreover, the general trend of the division between the two tenses does not seem to change at all, which raises doubts about the validity of the theory that burnt had its origins in the past participle and only spread into the preterite later. Since we will never be able to trace the moment when an author used the word burnt for the first time in history, a more plausible historical explanation could be that the irregular form has always been used for both tenses, even though the probability of it occurring in a past participle construction is always higher.

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