Irregular verb morphology in Nigerian English

Verb regularization is often characterized as a morphological Americanism in contemporary English. Using synchronic approach, this study investigates the regular -ed vs. irregular -t alternation preterites and past participles from British, American, Nigerian Englishes. Although verb patterns English are considered to be under growing influence of American English, corpus evidence Global Web-based International Corpus reveals that variants remain prevalent written data. To examine conditioning factors, dataset 1,643 annotated observations was subjected probabilistic modelling. The results indicate significant predictors behave heterogeneously three varieties, there some for indigenization These findings suggest role prescriptivism shaping usage users Second Language (ESL) can hardly overlooked.