The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Annotated data are provided in S5 (verbs) and S6 (roots).įunding: This work was supported by the European Science Foundation as part of the DRUST project, a EUROCORES EuroUnderstanding programme.
#ENGLISH IRREGULAR VERBS HISTORY SERIES#
Data are available as part of a series of corpora curated by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, and can be accessed freely at.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Received: Accepted: JPublished: August 1, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Cuskley et al. PLoS ONE 9(8):Įditor: Matjaz Perc, University of Maribor, Slovenia These findings contribute to the debate on how language systems become rule governed, and how and why they sustain exceptions to rules, providing insight into the interplay between the emergence and maintenance of rules and exceptions in language.Ĭitation: Cuskley CF, Pugliese M, Castellano C, Colaiori F, Loreto V, Tria F (2014) Internal and External Dynamics in Language: Evidence from Verb Regularity in a Historical Corpus of English.
We analyze the set of irregulars, showing they may adhere to a set of minority rules, allowing for increased stability of irregularity over time. Despite continuous vocabulary growth, and presumably, an attendant increase in expressive power, there is no corresponding growth in irregularity. At the same time, existing verbs might tend to regularize or irregularize as a consequence of internal dynamics, but overall, the amount of irregularity sustained by the language stays roughly constant over time. The data show that the language is open, with many new verbs entering. How does irregularity linger in the face of internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) pressures to conform to a rule? Here we address this problem by taking a detailed look at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities.
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