ENGLISH VOWEL LAXING VERBS The 29 words in the table below comprise all the monomorphemic words from the Oxford English Dictionary that are spelled with –eep or –eap and that can be used as verbs. Quite a few such verbs lax the vowel in the root in the past tense, e.g. sleep [slip] with past slept [slpt]. Others, however, do not, e.g. beep [bip] with past beeped [bipt], not *[bpt]. I have never heard some of the verbs here at all (e.g. dreep), and some I have never heard used as verbs (like jeep), but the OED accompanies all its entries with attestations of usage, so we have to believe them! beep reap ‘harvest grain’ bleep reap ‘rip up’ cheap ‘barter, trade’ seep cheep sheep ‘weed or dung land by pasturing sheep on it’ creep sleep deep ‘make deep’ sneap ‘nip, pinch’ dreep ‘fall in drops’ steep ‘place in sloping position’ heap steep ‘soak in water’ jeep ‘travel by jeep’ sweep keep threap ‘rebuke, scold’ leap weep leep ‘wash with cow-dung and water’ wheep ‘give a sharp whistle at intervals’ neap ‘keep a ship aground or in a harbor’ yeep ‘cheep, making cheeping sounds’ peep ‘make peeping sound’ zeep ‘elicit a zipping sound from’ peep ‘peer through small opening’ There are enough verbs like keep/kept to say that there is a rule of PAST TENSE LAXING. Does this rule seem to be (semi-)productive, or is it “dead” in the sense that English speakers have just memorized a list of a few verbs that undergo it? Stated in our productivity terminology, is PAST TENSE LAXING a minor rule, which, with enough restrictions on the rule itself, applies fairly freely, or must the rule be restricted to apply only only to words marked with a feature [+PAST TENSE LAXING]? Some things to consider: - What happens with wugs? (A number of these verbs would actually be wugs for most speakers!) - Are basic verbs treated differently from verbs derived from nouns or adjectives by conversion? - Among basic verbs, do factors such as frequency or meaning make a difference? One way to start might be to put the words into categories suggested by these questions.An Approach to an Analysis Basic verbs that undergo PAST TENSE LAXING for all native speakers of English (6/29): creep, keep, leap, sleep, sweep, weep Basic verbs that do not undergo PAST TENSE LAXING for native speakers of English (4/29): peep ‘peer’, reap ‘harvest’, seep, steep ‘soak’ Basic verbs that I don’t know and hence could have never heard a past tense (9/29): cheap ‘barter’, dreep, leep, reap ‘rip up’, sneap, threap, wheep, yeep, zeep Verbs derived from nouns or adjectives by conversion that do undergo PAST TENSE LAXING (0/29): Verbs derived from nouns or adjectives by conversion that do not undergo PAST TENSE LAXING (10/29): beep, bleep, cheep, deep, heap, jeep, neap (neap tides have the smallest difference between high and low tide, thus neaping a ship), peep ‘make peeping sounds’, sheep, steep ‘make a slope’ Let us say that lexically, words have the following structures: Basic verb: [ WORD ]VERB Converted verb: [ [ WORD ]NOUN ]VERB [ [ WORD ]ADJ ]VERB Verbs derived by conversion never undergo PAST TENSE LAXING. This means that we can significantly restrict the rule by requiring that it apply only to underived verbs PAST TENSE LAXING /i/  [] /__p]VERB + t ]PAST This leaves us with six familiar verbs that do undergo the rule and four that do not. The latter four seem to be of lower frequency than the former six, making me favor letting the rule apply freely and marking the latter four as [-PAST TENSE LAXING], but the small difference of six vs. four, makes this analysis a ittle weak. A possible tie-breaker is to defer to wugs, and in this case, the data itself has some good wugs, namely, all the unfamiliar basic verbs for which most of us have never heard a past tense: I’ll threap you today just like I _______ you yesterday! In addition to the morphological distinction, the rule is phonologically restricted just to verbs of the underlying root shape /ONSET ip/. There are other tense nuclei that lax and other codas before which laxing takes place (lose/lost, light/lit, feed/fed). Most of these are unique, and if they have an associated rule at all, they would have to be marked with of a rule feature like [+PAST TENSE LAXING]2, etc. Of these there is one group, however, that looks like a rule is a work: -eed ~ -ead (feed/fed, breed/bred, read/read, etc., and meet/met with –eet). Try an analysis like that for –eep ~ -eap