Past tense morphology of North American Icelandic

Abstract

The study focuses on the past tense morphology of North American Icelandic to answer the questions of how faithful the past tense construction is to the pre-immigration variety, in what way the speakers deviate from the expected past tense form, and whether they tend to overgeneralize one verb formation over another. The results show that the tense system is still quite robust and that deviations are rare. When deviations do occur, the speakers tend to use another form of the verb from elsewhere in the verbal paradigm, rather than overgeneralizing particular past-tense rules.