Participial "slow + -n"

[Charles C Doyle]

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

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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

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