Separated by a Common Language

I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...

Mike C from Shropshire asks:

Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. …  Any thoughts?

Not all pleading can be pled

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is fairly particular to legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:

• He pled guilty   = real but prescriptively frowned-upon 
• She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
• He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
• ?? She pled for their forgiveness.  = unnatural-sounding

As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:

Because of this, to get a purer comparison of pleaded versus pled, I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.

The British history of pled

Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!

The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:

pled guilty in Hansard

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)

The American history of pled

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants.  But.

In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. That's unlikely to have anything to do with Scottishness—the biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). 

It's very possible, then, that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with  lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. 

At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on. 

Pled guilty in speech

I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech.) 

The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:

• pled guilty:  356 
• pleaded guilty: 295 

I can look at these in (more BrE) films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA.  Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:

 

	UK	USA
pleaded guilty	.02	.02
pled guilty	—	.07

While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.

Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?

It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.

At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile.

Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland.

But I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Scottish parliament published the  Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled). 

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