ABSTRACT
There is a small class of verbs in English having variation in past participle and preterit forms between -ed and -t (Bryant 1962, pp. 78, 125–26, and the references she there provides). 1 The graphic variation does not correspond in a direct or simple way with a variation in speech, and the spoken situation is also complicated by the fact that in some cases the -t forms co-occur with vowel change, which may (knelt) or may not (dreamt) be reflected in spelling. This chapter is, in any case, concerned solely with the graphic representation of the variants in educated, institutionalised orthography; no attempt will here be made to extend the inquiry to the spoken distribution of inflectional variants.
