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“My cat likes to be pet.” Does that sentence sound grammatically correct to your ear?

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To my ear, at any rate, it does not sound correct. Shouldn’t it be “to be petted”? But I’ve recently heard this use of pet as a past participle (more on that below) from at least two well-educated native speakers of English. Both are over the age of 65, if that matters.

Let’s see what’s going on linguistically.

As you know (if you graduated from high school before 1966), English verbs have three principal parts, such as go/went/gone (a strong or irregular verb) or enjoy/enjoyed/enjoyed (a weak or regular verb). Examples can provide needed context:

  1. Donald and Matilda go to Paris every weekend.
  2. Donald and Matilda went to Paris for Christmas.
  3. Donald and Matilda have gone to Paris (and are not currently at home).

A few observations:

  • The technical names for these three forms are usually present tense, past tense, past participle respectively.
  • The term present tense is highly misleading. The form actually doesn’t tell you anything about tense; in the example it refers to past and future — but not present, unless it’s currently the weekend!
  • In most Indo-European languages, including English, the principal parts are sufficient to let you form all the verb forms from them. In this case we automatically get to go, goes, going, and has gone in addition to the three in the examples.
  • There are often a few exceptions, particularly for the verb to be. In English, for instance, its past tense is odd, because it is the only verb where two of the past-tense forms (1st- and 3rd-person singular) differ from the infinitive in one way and the other past-tense forms differ from the infinitive in a different way (was vs. were)!
  • In some verbs, two of the principal parts (or sometimes all three) have identical forms (e.g., buy/bought/bought and put/put/put).

So what’s going on with pet? Is it pet/pet/petted, as I claim, or is it pet/pet/pet, which we see in a new dialect (or idiolect) of English, as this tiny bit of evidence suggests? If the second version is taking over, why? Is it by analogy with set/set/set? I keep claiming that linguistics is a science, so we’re going to need evidence, not opinions. Stay tuned…

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Categories: Linguistics