Thunk: the cognitive processes behind language change

This study investigates the cognitive processes underlying the emergence and usage of thunk as a non-standard past participle and, less frequently, past tense form of think in present-day English. A corpus-based qualitative approach was adopted, and data were drawn from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). A total of 71 relevant instances were identified, analyzed for diachronic development, frequency, and contextual distribution. Findings reveal that while thunk historically appeared in both past simple and participial contexts, its modern usage is restricted to the would have + participle and woulda + participle constructions, especially in colloquial expressions such as Who would have thunk…?. As a result, the analysis considers three cognitive mechanisms (categorization, analogy, and automatization) as potential explanations for this shift. Categorization links think to phonologically similar strong verbs (e.g., drink – drunk), which enables analogical innovation. However, evidence from corpus data suggests that automatization, driven by high-frequency co-occurrence and phonetic reduction in predictable contexts, plays a central role in the entrenchment of thunk. These findings highlight the importance of usage-based processes in language change and suggest that thunk’s persistence is shaped more by routinized discourse patterns than by systematic morphological reanalysis. Future research should explore phonetic realizations in spontaneous speech and constructional frameworks to assess its integration into contemporary English.