and r 5 Palatalveolar Review of Related Theories

researcher sees the characteristic of each class to determine the group where the verb should be. The examination process starts from class I. In class I, the vowel sound is a dipthong so is class II. Thus, “sing” surely does not belong to class I or II. In class III, the vowel is followed by a sonorant. Sonorant sounds are: nasal and liquid. The sound after ɪ is a nasal ŋ. Thus, the verb sing belong to this class. After getting all verbs in the group, the present researcher will make some subclasses based on the vowel sound of each class. It will result in one class will have some subclass. Taken for an example is class III. Besides “sing”, the verb “send” is also a member of class III with phonetic transcription send. The vowel sound is e. Getting those two different vowel sounds, it is clear that there will be at least two subclasses in class III. Following this, in answering the second research question, the present researcher will see the environment of the stem vowel which happens to be the initial and final sound to see a general environment shared based on the sequence of the changing. Taken for an example is the verb “sing”. Using the phonetic transcription, the sequence from inifinitive until past participle is s ɪŋ - sæŋ - s ʌŋ. Based on the phonetic transcription, the initial sound of it is s and the final sound of it is ŋ. Then, a formula is composed ɪ  æ  ʌ s_ŋ. In the answer of second research question, the subclass of the answer of the first research question will be developed into several subclasses. Taken for an example is the vowel sound ɪ which has some sequences such as ɪ - æ - ʌ, ɪ - ɪ - ɪ, and ɪ - æ - ʌ. Examining each member of each subclass, the present researcher tries to make generalization of the environment. 15

CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

By using the ablaut theory as explained in the previous chapter, the present researcher classified the 134 Present Day irregular verbs in seven classes. The verbs taken are only the stem verbs. Thus any verbs containing prefix such as under-, over-, are out of the classification. The result is as below: No Class Number Percentage 1 I 28 20.9 2 II 6 4.5 3 III 39 29.1 4 IV 8 6 5 V 53 39.5 6 VI - - 7 VII - - A. The Classification of English Irregular Verbs based on Ablaut Rule The seven classes are in the form of ablaut rules which classified the irregular verbs based on their vowel changes regarding on some circumstances. Those seven classes are discussed as below. However, to make it easy to follow, the present researcher will explain a basic notation use in the rule. Every notation of each class will be A followed by its circumstances. A in this case stands for