use(d) to

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:45 PM -0400 8/14/03, Steve Boatti wrote:
>In a message dated 8/14/03 12:36:35 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:
>
>
>>  this, however, is problematic.  it assumes that speakers connect
>>  the verb in [just@] (conveying tense/aspect semantics) with the
>>  ordinary verb [juz] 'employ', which seems pretty dubious to me.
>>  (maybe some do, but it's a pretty big leap.)
>>
>>  the alternative is to assume that tense/aspect [just@] is always
>>  spelled <used to>, regardless of the syntactic context.
>>
>
>"Used to" is clearly a preterite -- it always refers to past action and has
>the preterite ending. All other preterites with "I did" drop the "d"
>ending and
>employ the present form of the verb. Why is it so difficult to do the same
>with "used" in this context?
>
Again, because it isn't pronounced that way or treated that way
grammatically, as Arnold has noted.  If it were treated like a like a
normal preterite based on the verb "use", "That's the car I used to
drive" would be homonymous between the two meanings (I used that car
to drive, I formerly used that car), but the latter meaning can only
be pronounced "yoose-ta" (with some possible variation in the final
vowel between schwa and something closer to /u/, but with no voicing
in the -st- cluster).  The fact that it's more of a (quasi-)modal
than a preterite makes it hard to write "didn't use to", but that
fact that it's treated orthographically (in the positive) as if it
were (still) "used" + "to" makes it hard to write "didn't used to".

Larry