Re: THEORY: Verbs go irregular before our very eyes!

John Cowan:
> And Rosta wrote:
> > From the learner's point
> > of view, none of this makes any difference; my point is just that from the
> > analyst's point of view, varying degrees of ingenuity will find varying
> > degrees of regularity.
>
> Granted.  But the distinction between regularity and irregularity
> is not purely an analytical convenience: there are testable differences
> between what is processed by the syntax-rule-machine and what is
> processed by the pattern-associator-machine.  (We need to talk to
> some Maori speakers with genetic defects!)
But systemic regularity and psycholinguistic regularity are not
necessarily the same thing, given that the psycho evidence is that
the more frequent a systemic regular is, the more likely it is
to be stored preinflected & hence processed like an irregular.

> > More generally, though, I believe that unless (as in English) regular
> > and irregular inflection have phonologically different repercussions,
> > inflectional (ir)regularity is largely an irrelevance to the existing
> > lexicon.
>
> Can you expand on this?   What different repercussions, and what
> existing lexicon?
The existing lexicon = words already existing in the language.
Apart from that, I have no idea what I was trying to say.

--And.