Participial "slow + -n"

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Mar 31, 2011, at 1:35 PM, Charles C Doyle wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Participial "slow + -n"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I too am from Texas, but the form doesn't sound very normal to me (thence the posting!).
>
> I can imagine, say, "is not slowing down" sounding like "is not slown down"--but that's grammatically a different structure from "has slown down."
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of William Salmon [wsalmon1 at INTERCHANGE.UBC.CA]
> Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2011 11:07 AM
>
>
>> During a UFC cage-fighting bout last night (yes, I sometimes watch that!), the excited ring-side (or octagon-side) announcer remarked that one of the combatants "has slown down considerably."  Perhaps the speaker stumbled into an inadvertent analogy with "show" or the like--or else an archaic form bubbled to the surface structure.
>>
>> The phrase "slown down" garners some 40,000 Google hits, many of them obvious typos--but some not, >including this tiny item in UrbanDictionary.com (s.v. "slown"):  "a word used to describe the act of slowing >down. I guess it is a Texas thing."
>
>
> I'm from Texas, and that usage sounds pretty normal to me :-)
>
> WS

"He's slown down" considerably for the perfect sounds normal to me, too. I associate "slowed" with the past tense.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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