Cover not available

Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 43:1 (2019) ► pp.44–91

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Deconstructing (ir)regularity

ORCiD logo with link | University of Surrey
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17042.her
Abstract
Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most frequent usage conflates or replaces other notions such as type frequency, productivity, (non-)concatenative morphology, storage vs. computation, predictability, etc. An assessment of these and other variables in Icelandic verbal inflection reveals that most of them are in practice strongly correlated. I conclude, however, that this is largely unsurprising by virtue of the definitional dependencies holding between those notions. It is empirically doubtful whether there exists a single underlying phenomenon or category which the terms designate. In addition, given their multiple and overlapping senses, and the existence of separate, unambiguous labels for the relevant underlying notions, I contend that the terms ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ should be ideally abandoned in scientific literature in order to avoid ambiguity, sloppy reasoning and misunderstandings and to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The use of the terms
    • 2.1‘Irregular’ as ‘infrequent’ (as per type frequency)
    • 2.2‘Irregular’ as ‘unproductive’
    • 2.3‘Irregular’ as ‘non-concatenative’
    • 2.4‘Irregular’ as ‘unpredictable’
    • 2.5‘Irregular’ as ‘stored’
    • 2.6Other associations of ‘irregular’
    • 2.7‘Irregular’ as some combination of the above
    • 2.8Discussion
  • 3.The empirical picture
    • 3.1Correlations in Icelandic verbs
    • 3.2Statistical analysis
    • 3.3Discussion and interpretation of the findings
    • 3.4A few cross-linguistic observations
      • 3.4.1Productive ≠ frequent
      • 3.4.2Productive ≠ segmentable
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (83)
References
Ackerman, Farrell & Robert Malouf. 2013. Morphological organization: The low conditional entropy conjecture. Language 89(3). 429–464. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 1993. On frequency, transparency and productivity. Yearbook of morphology 1992. 181–208. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Probabilistic approaches to morphology. In Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay & Stefanie Jannedy (eds.), Probabilistic linguistics, 229–287. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew. 2017. Seri verb classes: morphosyntactic motivation and morphological autonomy. Language 92. 4.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew, Greville Corbett & Dunstan Brown. 2010. Defective paradigms: Missing forms and what they tell us. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2001. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar. 2010. Capturing particulars and universals in clause linkage. In Isabelle Bril (ed.), Clause-hierarchy and clause-linking: the syntax and pragmatics interface, 51–101. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bittner, Andreas & Klaus-Michael Köpcke (eds.). 2016. Regularität und Irregularität in Phonologie und Morphologie: diachron, kontrastiv, typologisch. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blevins, James P. 2005. Word-based declensions in Estonian. Yearbook of morphology 2005. 1–25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blevins, James P., Petar Milin & Michael Ramscar. 2017. The Zipfian Paradigm Cell Filling Problem. In F. Kiefer, J. P. Blevins & H. Bartos (eds.), Perspectives on Morphological Organization: Data and Analyses, 139–158. Leiden: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1935. [1933]. Language. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bonami, Olivier, & Gilles Boyé. 2006. Deriving Inflectional Irregularity. In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Varna, 361–380. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bonami, Olivier, Gilles Boyé, Hélène Giraudo & Madeleine Voga. 2008. Quels verbes sont réguliers en français? In J. Durand, B. Habert & B. Laks (eds.), Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, 1511–1523. EDP Sciences.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 1999. Lexical storage and regular processes. Behavioural and brain sciences 22(6). 1016. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Dunstan & Andrew Hippisley. 2012. Network morphology: A defaults-based theory of word structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 101. 425–455. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. Productivity, regularity and fusion: how language use affects the lexicon. In Rajendra Singh (ed.), Trubetzkoy’s orphan. Proceedings of the Montréal roundtable morphonology: contemporary responses, 247–269. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clahsen, Harald, Monika Rothweiler, Andreas Woest & Gary F. Marcus. 1992. Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals. Cognition 45(3). 225–255. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville G. 2007. Canonical Typology, Suppletion, and Possible Words. Language 83(1). 8–42. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011. Higher order exceptionality in inflectional morphology. In Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (eds.), Expecting the unexpected: exceptions in grammar, 107–126. Berin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville, Andrew Hippisley, Dunstan Brown & Paul Marriot. 2009. Frequency, regularity and the paradigm: A perspective from Russian on a complex relation. In Joan Bybee & Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 201–227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croft, William & D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dammel, Antje. 2008. Flexionsmorphologische Irregularität – ein graduelles Phänomen. Doch wie lassen sich Grade bestimmen? In Cornelia Stroh & Aina Urdze (eds.), Morphologische Irregularität: neue Ansätze, Sichtweisen und Daten, 1–28. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Di Sciullo, Anna Maria & Edwin Williams. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U. (ed.). 1987. Leitmotifs in natural morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frank, Wright Jay. 1999. Nuer noun morphology. Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo PhD dissertation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fratini, Viviana, Joana Acha & Itziar Laka. 2014. Frequency and morphological irregularity are independent variables. Evidence from a corpus study of Spanish verbs. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10(2). 289–314.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gisborne, Nikolas & Andrew Hippisley (eds.). 2017. Defaults in Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Glück, Helmut (ed.). 2010. Metzler Lexikon der Sprache. Stuttgart: Metzler. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred (ed.). 2001. A Dictionary of European Anglicisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Alex Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from building 201, 111–176. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1989. Schemas in Hausa plural formation: Product-orientation and motivation vs. source-orientation and generation. Buffalo Working Papers in Linguistics 89(1). 32–74.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. Understanding Morphology. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 421. 25–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language 86(3). 663–687. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herce Calleja, Borja. 2016. Why frequency and irregularity are not independent variables in Spanish: a response to Fratini et al. (2014). Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(2). 389–406.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hockett, Charles F. 1987. Refurbishing our foundations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some properties of Grammaticalization. In Elizabeth Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Idris, Hélène Fatima. 2004. Modern developments in the Dinka language. University of Göteborg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Iva, Sulev. 2007. Võru kirjakeele sõnamuutmissüsteem. Tartu, Estonia: University of Tartu PhD thesis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaeger, Jeri J., Alan H. Lockwood, David L. Kemmerer, Robert D. Van Valin Jr, Brian W. Murphy & Hanif G. Khalak. 1996. A positron emission tomographic study of regular and irregular verb morphology in English. Language, 451–497. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jörg, Christina. 1989. Isländische Konjugationstabellen: Icelandic Conjugation Tables-Tableaux de Conjugaison Islandaise-Beygingatöflur Islenskra Sagna. Hambrg: Buske.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendall, Maurice G. 1938. A new measure of rank correlation. Biometrika 301. 81–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kiefer, Ferenc. 2000. Regularity. In Geert Booij et al. (eds.), Morphologie: ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung, 296–302. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert, Bert Remijsen & Caguor Adong Manyang. 2009. On the distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology: Evidence from Dinka. Language 85(3). 659–670. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacCallum, Robert C., Shaobo Zhang, Kristopher J. Preacher & Derek D. Rucker. 2002. On the practice of dichotomization of quantitative variables. Psychological Methods 71. 19–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mansfield, John. 2016. Intersecting formatives and inflectional predictability: How do speakers and learners predict the correct form of Murrinhpatha verbs? Word Structure 9(2). 183–214. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William & Lorraine K. Tyler. 1998. Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in cognitive sciences 2(11). 428–435. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matthews, Peter Hugoe. 1972. Inflectional morphology: A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne. 2012. The deeper regularities behing irregularities. In Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Aina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), Irregularity in Morphology (and beyond), 1–21. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mörkuð íslensk málheild. [The Tagged Icelandic Corpus.] (n.d.) Sigrún Helgadóttir (ed.). The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Accessed [January 2017] from malfong.is.
Nübling, Damaris. 2000. Prinzipien der Irregularisierung: eine kontrastive Analyse von zehn Verben in zehn Germanischen Sprachen. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011a. How do exceptions arise? On different paths to morphological irregularity. In Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (eds.), Expecting the unexpected: exceptions in grammar, 139–162. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011b. Statement on the commentary by Wolfgang U. Dressler. In Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (eds.), Expecting the unexpected: exceptions in grammar, 169–172. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oxford Dictionary of English. 2010. [1998]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pearson, Karl. 1900. On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 50(302). 157–175. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. 1991. Rules of language. Science 253(5019). 530–535. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Words and rules in the human brain. Nature 3871. 547–548. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. Words and Rules. New York: Harper Perennial.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven & Allan Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 281. 73–193. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven & Michael T. Ullman. 2002. The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(11). 456–463. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo & Harald Baayen. 2009. Suffix ordering and morphological processing. Language 85(1). 109–152. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Plank, Frans. 1981. Morphologische (Ir-)Regularitäten. Aspekte der Wortstrukturtheorie. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
RAE-ASALE (= Real Academia Española / Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española). 2009. Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rovai, Francesco. 2012. On some Latin morphological (ir)regularities. In Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Aina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera (eds.). Irregularity in Morphology (and beyond), 187–212. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Royle, Phaedra, Gustavo Beritognolo & Eve Bergeron. 2012. Regularity, sub-regularity and irregularity in French acquisition. In Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Aina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera (eds.). Irregularity in Morphology (and beyond), 227–250. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stolz, Thomas, Hitomi Otsuka, Aina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera. 2012. Introduction: Irregularity – glimpses of a ubiquitous phenomenon. In Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Aina Urdze & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), Irregularity in Morphology (and beyond), 7–38. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stroh, Cornelia & Aina Urdze (eds.). 2008. Morphologische Irregularität: neue Ansätze, Sichtweisen und Daten. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stump, Gregory & Raphael A. Finkel. 2013. Morphological typology: From word to paradigm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stump, Gregory. 2016. Paradigms at the interface of a lexeme’s syntax and semantics with its inflectional morphology. In Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds.), Morphological Metatheory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tamariz, Monica & Andrew D. Smith. 2008. Regularity in mappings between signals and meanings. In Andrew D. Smith & Kenny Smith (eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference (EVOLANG7), 315–322. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thornton, Anna M. 2012. Reduction and maintenance of overabundance. A case study on Italian verb paradigms. Word Structure 5(2). 183–207. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ullman, Michael T. 2001. The declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 301. 37–69. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Uspenskaja, I. D. 2009. Sovremennyj slovar’ nesklonjaemyx slov russkogo jazyka. Moscow: Astrel’.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Qiang. 2014. Gender Assignment of Russian Indeclinable Nouns. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon MA Thesis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1989. Inflectional morphology and naturalness. Vol. 91. Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yang, Charles. 2005. On productivity. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 51. 265–302. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. How to wake up irregular (and speechless). In Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses. Language Science Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zadok, Gila & Outi Bat-El. 2015. Inter-paradigm leveling in Hebrew verbal system. Morphology 25(3). 271–297. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zaliznjak, Andrej A. 1977. Grammaticheskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka [Grammatical dictionary of the Russian language]. Moscow: Russkije Slovari.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The psycho-biology of language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Herce, Borja & Bogdan Pricop
2025. VeLeRo: an inflected verbal lexicon of standard Romanian and a quantitative analysis of morphological predictability. Language Resources and Evaluation 59:1 ► pp. 621 ff. DOI logo
Marzi, Claudia & Vito Pirrelli
2023. A discriminative information-theoretical analysis of the regularity gradient in inflectional morphology. Morphology 33:4 ► pp. 459 ff. DOI logo
Price-Williams, David & Matt Davies
2023. Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input. First Language 43:1 ► pp. 112 ff. DOI logo
Herce, Borja
2022. Possessive inflection in Chichimec inalienable nouns. Studies in Language 46:4 ► pp. 901 ff. DOI logo
Herce, Borja
2025. VeLeSpa: An inflected verbal lexicon of Peninsular Spanish and a quantitative analysis of paradigmatic predictability. Language Resources and Evaluation 59:2 ► pp. 1705 ff. DOI logo
Herce, Borja
2025. Central Pame verbal inflection. Studies in Language 49:2 ► pp. 412 ff. DOI logo
Nieder, Jessica, Ruben van de Vijver & Holger Mitterer
2021. Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings. Morphology 31:2 ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue