Past participle leveling in the present perfect construction: a corpus-based qualitative analysis

Abstract

drank) in spoken American English. The first part of the study outlines the theoretical background, focusing on past participle variation and Construction Grammar. The second part of the thesis presents a qualitative analysis of the frequency, verb types, and discourse contexts of leveled forms in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Finally, the findings are interpreted as evidence of competing constructions and stable variation, contributing to broader accounts of morphosyntactic variation. The conclusion summarizes the main results and suggests directions for future research. Keywords: past participle leveling, present perfect, Construction Grammar, qualitative corpus analysis, constructional competition, present-day American English