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 Kövecses (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):

1. David Ginola once dreamed of displaying his skills in a major European city beginning with B. (The Independent 2000)

2. Whoever dreamt up the idea of five-day Test cricket clearly had too much time on their hands. (The Independent 2000)

3. AT&T's stock price leaped $6.125, or 11 percent, on Mr. Allen's news. (New York Times 1995)

4. 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.