| 词组 | run |
| 释义 | run Funny things happen to our verbs. Run results from the coming together in Middle English of two older verbs, an intransitive rinnan and a causative irnan. The first of these produced the past ran and the second produced the past run. If everything had developed according to theory, we would now have, according to Lamberts 1972, a verb rin with a past singular ran, a past plural run, and a past participle run or runnen, in the same class of irregular verbs as ring, swim, and begin. But things went awry in early modern English: run replaced rin sometime around the 16th century (Lamberts says rin still survives in Scottish and Irish folk speech). So instead of developing into rin, ran, run, the verb developed into two patterns, run, ran, run and run, run, run. (If you look into the OED, you will see the full story is much more complex than this brief sketch reveals.) In terms of current usage, the problem with this verb centers on the past run. It appears in literature from the 16th to the 19th centuries; Jespersen 1909-49 (volume 6) lists Shakespeare, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, and Goldsmith as using it. Modern dialectologists, such as Michael I. Miller (American Speech, Summer 1984), attest its currency in speech in both southern England and in parts of the U.S. But ran is now virtually theonly form used in writing. Modern practice may be partly attributable to Johnson's Dictionary (1755), where only ran is listed for the past. Lowth 1762 attacked past run, and the tradition in school grammars ever since has been to insist on ran. Noah Webster 1828 gave ran or run, departing from Johnson, and his successors through 1909 followed suit. Webster's Second, however, called run dialectal, and Webster's Third calls it nonstandard. Miller feels this treatment misrepresents the usage of past run, and perhaps it does to some extent. But dictionaries find it hard to devise a short descriptor that will mean "used in speech in southern England and in the southern U.S. and New England, especially by older people, and used formerly in literature." In any case, there is no denying that past run is now considered nonstandard by many people, if not by dialectologists. The surveys of Leonard 1932 and Crisp 1971 indicate as much. If it is part of your natural speech, you should not avoid it. But you will want to use ran in writing, as just about everyone now does. |
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