Karl,
For "supposed," I was assuming -- and now that you've made me think about it, I'm wondering if this is a false assumption -- that speakers don't normally use a representation/processing strategy for the "supposed to" construction that requires tagging the -ed as a suffix. That's what I meant by "fused." The meaning of "supposed" here is so divergent from the meaning of "suppose" as a regular verb that I want to treat them as separate lexical items (and that was the connection with "used to" -- I want to treat that "use(d)" as a different lexical item from the "use" that's paraphrasable as "utilize," at least in terms of what I think goes on in modern speakers' heads). Since you can get non-participles in the "be ____ to" kinda-modal frame (e.g. "be about to," "be able to"), and since you *only* get that particular "supposed" in the -ed form, it's ripe for reanalysis. It's my structuralism showing -- if the form doesn't contrast with one without the -ed, the -ed isn't marking anything (except now, it has become a marker of literacy/education, and can so is potential fodder for hypercorrections). It started as a participle, but it's not in complementary distribution with any non-participle version of the same lexeme.
Or to put it another way, I think many, if not most, speakers grow up initially thinking what others on the list have described: there's a word "suppohs," or even "supposta." And then school tells them they have to spell it fancy. They may add a new representation (in the same way that students who have a unit on Greek and Latin prefixes can add additional representations of words they already know), but that's not what they use for normal processing. For "supposed," the fused version gives you results that make everyone happy (unless you don't get the part about the writing the silent -d), so you even if you add a new representation, there's no practical effect. For "used," you hit a fork in the road.
Whether negation requires do-support (in the old terminology) has to do with how "modal" the forms have become, but doesn't have to do with fusion in that sense. The alternation between "have to," "has to" and "had to," on the other hand, does; it constantly encourages speakers to break apart the morphemes. If you think of the "used" of "used to" as fused, "didn't use to" looks typo-ish in the same way "am suppose to" looks typo-ish. Apparently, it's become fused enough for enough people that the OED and usage guides don't want to try to legislate it one way or another. My clunky use of "my brain wants to..." was motivated by my recognition that I'm probably in the fused set, and that the fused set is by no means everyone. For "supposed," I think most people are in the fused set.
Of course, the fact that I can set up a analysis that doesn't tag the -ed, doesn't mean that's what people do, and the relations between "supposed" and "suppose" aren't as opaque as those between, say, "work" and "wrought" (where I'm really confident about saying modern speakers don't normally treat the latter as a participle, at least not before their linguistics courses). I might should oughta check to see if there's any actual evidence from psycholinguistic studies before I make any more sweeping generalizations...
--- Bill Spruiell
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Karl Hagen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 4:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: didn't use(d) to
Bill,
But is it fully fused if you want to negate with 'did'? Doesn't that
suggest that "supposed to" is NOT completely modalized, since it's still
forming negation the in the same way as other main verbs?
And I'm sure you know this, but of course with 'was supposed to' the -ed
there comes from the past participle, not the plain past tense marker,
as with 'used to', so there's no doubling of the tense marking, and your
brain's resistance to dropping the -ed there seems logical.
Karl
On 06/14/2011 11:45 AM, Spruiell, William C wrote:
> I remember being quite put out by "iced cream" when I encountered the example in a historical linguistics class when I was in early graduate school -- I had this comfortable sense of righteous indignation at people who were writing "ice tea," and then the example contextualized the entire thing at the expense of my inner prescriptivist. Darn history and its humility-inducing ways.
>
> For what it's worth, the historical COHA corpus has an 18:2 tilt in favor of "didn't use to," with the bulk of "use"-examples being 1890 or earlier and all two "used"-examples being later. But those are very small numbers, and at least one of them is a potentially false hit, so I'm not sure how much that tells us. For modern English, COCA has 2:2, so it's a wash. Google-searching gets you 123:73 (million), keeping in mind that Googling gets you tons of false hits of various sorts (the results only mean much if the factors causing the false hits are relatively equivalent for both of the things you're searching for).
>
> My brain wants to treat "used to" as a fully fused form, analogous to "supposed to," and since I think "I wasn't suppose to do that" looks odd, I don't want to write "I didn't use to do that." But the numbers seem to be slightly in favor of the "didn't use to" variant, and that ice cream effect will probably tilt things further.
>
> --- Bill Spruiell
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 11:37 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: didn't use(d) to
>
> Whether or not there is an approved spelling, this looks like a case of the “ice cream” phenomenon, where a final dental stop (/d/ or /t/) gets deleted before a consonant-initial word. Other examples are
>
> skim milk
> ice tea
> stuff peppers
> etc.
>
> The two spellings would probably be pronounced the same, without the final /d/.
>
> Herb
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dick Veit
> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 10:45 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: didn't use(d) to
>
> Two quotations from recently encountered novels:
>
> "There's bad blood now. Didn't use to be like that..." (dialog in Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans, p. 102, Kindle edition).
> "She didn't used to smoke around the kids..." (Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p. 126, Kindle edition).
>
> So which is it, didn't use to or didn't used to?
>
> A few usage guides I consulted prescribe "didn't use to," but others say both are standard. In my own writing, I probably would have used "didn't used to."
>
> On the one hand, "used to/didn't use to" would parallel other verbs (laughed/didn't laugh), but, on the other, we're talking about a quasimodal, and with modals we can expect significant variations from other verbs. Pronunciation is no help--both "use to" and "used to" are spoken identically as "useta."
>
> Thoughts?
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