Questioning the Terms: “Regular and Irregular Verbs” in English

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2019

It can be observed that in the teaching of English grammar verbs are always in focus. The English pedagogue, while dealing with verbs, usually concentrates on the tenses and the verb forms. Subsequently the morphology of verbs is highlighted. The pedagogue is concerned mostly with verbs that undergo irregular morphological changes. The phonological part of the verb inflection, it seems, is not highlighted as intensely as the morphological is done. And hence, the morphophonemic behaviour of the verb inflections, it can be observed, has not been enough or duly emphasized in the teaching of English verb forms. This paper intends to bring the morphophonemic behaviour of the past tense and past participle forms of English verbs under focus.

The present study employs a frequency-based corpus-driven approach to investigating the levelling and irregularization processes in ModE irregular verbs. It utilizes Mark Davies’ family of English corpora to examine the paradigms of seven irregular verbs in which the previously menitioned processes have resulted in introduction of double paradigms in standard and nonstandard English. The result of frequency-based analysis of the data extracted from the abovementioned corpora will be used to identify and interpret diachronic trends as well as synchronic regional variations with respect to levelling and irregularization processes. Additionally, based on the data analysis, the research questions regarding the prevalence, acceptability and regional Variation in context of levelling and irregularization will be answered.

LILIANA. The Regularity of English Irregular Verbs Seen in the Rule of Ablaut Yogyakarta: Department of English Letters, Faculty of Letters, Sanata Dharma University, 2015. English irregular verbs are those verbs considered as pattern-less. It implies that there is no way to learn it but memorizing them randomly. However, considering the different way of changing between the regular and irregular verbs which is in the sound changing, it is very possible to analyze the pattern of the sound changing. This study is conducted aim to see the pattern of the sound changing in the English Irregular Verbs especially in the vowel sound. There are two objectives of this study. The first is to find out how the English Irregular Verbs are classified. The second is to describe what kind of environment exists in each class of the English Irregular Verbs. In conducting this study, library method is used. In collecting the data, the present researcher takes all the irregular verbs in the Oxford English Advanced Dictionary the eight edition as the object of the study listed on page R2 up to R4 in the reference section. Meanwhile, in the data analysis the present researcher made the identification of the English irregular verbs based on their vowel root. After that, the classification was made based on the ablaut characteristic in each class. At last, the present researcher continued studying the environment of the vowel sound changing. However, there are some verbs which do not belong to the classes discussed. There are some findings in this study. The first is English Irregular Verbs fall into five classes of seven ablaut classes. The second is certain environment does exist in each class and subclasses.

Weak verbs in Modern English are sometimes mistakenly identifi ed with regular verbs. Although most weak verbs are indeed regular, there remain some which belong to the irregular group, for example spend, put, make, burn. Apart from drawing a clearer distinction between strong and weak verbs in relation to the regular and irregular division, the aim of this paper is to explain where the irregularity of these irregular weak verbs comes from and to gather possible relicts still present in Modern English. The paper discusses 56 such irregular weak verbs without vowel alternations and 9 archaisms preserving traces of such infl ection. The 56 irregular weak verbs are divided into groups according to the patterns they display and they are additionally marked depending on whether: (1) they have less common irregular preterite and past participle forms, which can be labelled as "literary" or "poetic," (2) they are literary themselves, (3) they have irregular preterite and past participle forms chiefl y in North American English, (4) they have regular variants. The initial plan included all irregular verbs but the extent of the problem coupled with the editorial limitations as to the size of the paper led to the following decisions: fi rst, to exclude the irregular strong verbs and save them for later analyses, and then, in the remaining irregular weak ones, to remove all those with vowel alternations (like keep, seek, lose, say) and to concentrate on the verbs without vowel alternations (investigated in the present paper). It is hoped that the aims of this paper as well as their realization can serve to make the content of the historical grammar course more meaningful to students by linking it to the problems present in Modern English and to the why-questions related to the subject of their studies.

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2010

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-BILL) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-FALL; taught-TEACH). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable REGULAR and IRREGULAR LENGTH PRESERVED facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.

lcs.pomona.edu

Surprisingly little research in the debate over the English past tense has focused on the regularity among irregular verbs (semiregularity; e.g., keep-kept, weep-wept). While previous experiments have shown that the presence of semiregular phonological neighbors can slow down production time for regular verbs (Seidenberg & Bruck 1990), little is known about the effect of regular neighbors on semiregulars. In this experiment, subjects completed a stem-inflection task by inflecting 81 randomly ordered verbs while RTs and errors were recorded. Both regular and irregular verbs were used, with varying degrees of individual frequency, family frequency, and family regularity. Linear regressions showed that both regulars and irregulars were subject to frequency as well as family regularity factors. The effect of family regularity was strongest when individual and family frequencies were low. These family regularity effects for irregulars are not consistent with dual-mechanism models like Words-and-Rules which claim that the presence of regular neighbors has no effect on irregular inflection. These results lend credence to the view that regulars, semiregulars, and pure irregulars are not processed independently, but fall along a continuum of regularity, which is consistent with single-mechanism Connectionist models.

We present the results of the first corpus analysis of Spanish verbs where the correlation between morphological irregularity and frequency was considered. In English, irregular verbs are more frequent than regular ones (Ullman, 1999 and Michel et al., 2011). We tested whether this frequency-irregularity relation observed in English would also hold in a more complex morphological system like Spanish. Results show that frequency and morphological irregularity do not correlate in Spanish. This pattern of results represents a challenge for the Dual-Mechanism model of morphology (Pinker and Prince 1988; Pinker and Ullman 2002), where all irregulars are argued to be stored whole in memory and are predicted to be more frequent than regulars.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology. 2021. Antonio Fábregas, Víctor Acedo-Matellán, Grant Armstrong, María Cristina Cuervo and Isabel Puyol. ISBN 9780367331573, 2021

The inflectional structure of the Spanish verb is complex due to the confluence of several grammatical categories: tense, aspect and mood on the one hand, number and person on the other. Spanish, however, is not a language with concatenative inflectional morphology and does not present specific morphemes for each of these categories. Because of this, there are mismatches between the semantic categories and the morphs that represent them; in other words, there is less phonological material than semantic categories. This problem means that segmentation in morphemes is not systematic and that there are various ways to analyse the structure of the verbal word, depending on the analytical model or the methodological posture assumed. In this chapter I will show, briefly, the problems that come with segmentation into morphemes, the most common generalizations that have been found and the different solutions proposed. Also, after careful analysis of the behaviour of verbal paradigms, I will propose a split of the tenses according to the way of representing grammatical categories in inflectional morphemes: on the one hand, tenses where a homogeneous and differentiated segmentation of inflectional marks is possible; on the other, those where it is not possible to segment those categories. This analysis allows identification of the regularities that exist in verbal inflection and explains, to some extent, the exceptions.

The present article investigates Pinker's (1991) Dual Mechanism model in non-native (and native) morphology. Adult Greek learners and English natives produced the past tense of English pseudo-verbs varying in their similarity to existing verbs. Results seem problematic for Dual Mechanism and indicate no qualitative difference between L1 and L2 regarding the representation of regular/irregular morphology.