On the Diachronic Stability of Irregularity in Inflectional Morphology

Abstract

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.

accepted to NAACL 2018; withdrawn in order to add more thorough experiments (coming in next version)