On the Diachronic Stability of Irregularity in Inflectional Morphology
This addresses the problem of understanding linguistic evolution for computational linguists and cognitive scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The study investigated the conditions for the survival of irregular words in inflectional morphology over time, finding that higher word frequency correlates with greater stability of irregularity in simulated language learners.
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can survive in a language over the course of time. Using recurrent neural networks to simulate language learners, we test the diachronic relation between frequency of words and their irregularity.