R Grammar Gaffes Ruining The Language? Maybe Not

[Igel]

11. Some of that is interlanguage.

Learners have a fairly standard progression in picking up morphology. Getting tense endings wrong by deleting them isn't all that uncommon.

It's reinforced by AAVE, which is the variety of native-speaker language a lot of LEPs are exposed to. They hear two varieties, one common and without final /s/ and one less common with it. They have a choice, they go with the simpler one, esp. since AAVE and Caribbean Spanish phonotactics agree on consonant simplification and the undesirablility of final /s/.


The past participle and preterite in English have been in flux since Chaucer's day. A lot of forms now standard as past participles were originally preterites. Irregular past participles are dropping like flies, mostly because of a lot of intralanguage register mixing.