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Internal and external dynamics in language: Evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English

What it is about

Irregular verbs persist in English although rules are efficient. The paper looks at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English, from 1830 to 1989. For each verb and each decade it computes the share of irregular past tokens. It then sets equal token counts per decade, so that the period size does not bias the result. The total number of irregular types stays roughly constant, and irregular forms make up 65 to 70% of past tokens over the whole period. The growth of the regular class comes from new verbs entering the language (external pressure). Regularisation and irregularisation within the core vocabulary are about equal in size (internal dynamics), and they occur in a specific frequency window. The irregular verbs fall into 52 phonological classes, which the authors use to show that many irregulars follow minority rules.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 14. Irregular verbs and 13. Verbs. The code is en/src/morph.rs (past-tense inflection and the morph::archaic forms). Measure: the share of past forms the morphology gets right on a held-out verb list, run twice, with the classes built from the training part only.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0102882 · arXiv 1408.2699

@misc{cuskley2014internal,
  title = {{Internal and external dynamics in language: Evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English}},
  author = {Cuskley, Christine F. and Pugliese, Martina and Castellano, Claudio and Colaiori, Francesca and Loreto, Vittorio and Tria, Francesca},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0102882},
  eprint = {1408.2699},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882}
}

References

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