| 词组 | see, seed, seen |
| 释义 | see, seed, seen The standard past tense of see is saw. American dialectologists say that the past forms see and seed are nonstandard and regionally restricted. Both of them were commonly used by the American dialect humorists of the 19th century, and seed was additionally listed as a Cockneyism as far back as 1807. Seen as the past tense seems to be widespread but nonstandard. There are at least two explanations for its low status. Margaret Shaklee in Shopen & Williams 1980 says that it was a southern regionalism brought into the north and midwest around the end of the 19th century by southerners who migrated north looking for work. This explanation is given some support as to chronology by our earliest evidence for the correction of seen, in Vizetelly 1906. Mencken 1963 (abridged), on the other hand, associates seen with the immigration of the Irish to the United States in the 1840s. His explanation is supported by the English Dialect Dictionary, which calls past tense seen chiefly Irish. In either case we see that a regional speech characteristic has turned into a social rather than a regional marker. Past seen, then, is a speech characteristic associated with the less educated and is used in writing chiefly to mark characters as being such. An example: • We had a visitor the other day, an old man, who said he wouldn't go to Europe if they gave it to him. Said a feller went over there and set down on some steps he seen in front of a church ... —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 1953 |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。