Re: (In)transitive verbs

Costentin Cornomorus scripsit:

> If you look at grammars of English written by the latter (Wright, etc)
> you won't find the terms "regular" and "irregular" used to describe
> verbs like these. On the other hand, if you look at a grammar written
> by an English Lit.  type, chances are pretty good you'll see verbs
> unaccountably sorted into regular and irregular.
That reflects the difference in purpose.  Wright & Co. were doing
comparative Germanistics, so it was natural for them to divide verbs
into the strong (with the inherited IE ablaut) and the weak (with the
innovated dental suffix), and take little or no account of regularity
or irregularity in any given language.

When talking about a single language synchronically, what counts is
which formations are productive and are automatically applied to novel
verbs (or nouns, or whatever) and which ones are not.  For Dutch nouns,
we have two regular plural suffixes -s and -en, which divide up the
territory based on a simple rule, and a bunch of irregulars.  In most
of the other cases, there is only one regular form.

What makes an irregular irregular?  The fact that its application is
lexical and either entirely unpredictable (except on etymological grounds)
or is only roughly predictable by analogy.  The creation of new strong
verbs in English (dove, shat) is purely by analogy with existing strong
verbs (strove, sat), and there are always perfectly regular verbs nearby
(arrived, knitted) which are not influenced by the analogy.  Indeed,
analogy tends to pull the other way, making irregulars regular eventually,
in inverse proportion to their frequency (not surprisingly, since if a
child does not learn a rare irregular form like "smote", the verb will
become "smited" and is unlikely to change back).

Some of the weak irregular verbs in English are in fact strong verbs
that were uncommon enough to be partly, but not completely, regularized:
sleep/slept was strong in OE, sleopan/slep; likewise weep.

> The regular/irregular argument is based on perception and subjective
> understanding,
By no means.  The difference between regular and irregular forms is
definite and even measurable:  except for the very commonest words,
where the regular forms may have been memorized, we can discriminate
between a regular and an irregular form of the same frequency by looking
at the time taken to retrieve it.

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