In my earlier entry
Google - worldwide genericide, there was a list of verbs "to google" in other languages, and I noted that all the verbs that show regular verb inflection. Why are they regular verbs? Let me show you here what happens when a new verb enters our language by looking at language acquisition of children learning English as their first language.
Preschool children (age 4 to 6) start talking in sentences, and they also start using their knowledge of morphology quite cleverly and productively. They encounter numerous new words everyday, but they somehow figure out the new words' parts of speech and how to inflect them.
We often see children make errors like
breaked or
comed - they overgeneralize the regular verb inflection rules to irregular verbs to make past tense. Unfortunately for children acquiring language, ten most frequent verbs in English, which could also be equivalent to ten most frequent verbs that the children need to learn early in life, are all irregular verbs (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get). Regular verbs come lower in frequency, but children, when they make past tense, apply productively the regular verb inflection rule, adding -d to the verb, to new verbs they encounter.
Berko (1957) has shown in experiments (so called
wug test) with preschool children the over-application of regular inflectional rules of nouns and verbs in nonsense words.
Number of nonsense monosyllabic words were made up, and pictures to represent the nonsense words were drawn on cards. A text, omitting the desired form was typed on each card. Children, and also adult subjects as control group, were shown the cards and the text read, and were induced to say the nonsense word in the inflected form. Here is an example of the question forming past tense.
This is a man who knows how to RICK. He is RICKING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday?
Yesterday, he ..............................
Over 76 percent of the children answered RICKED. They apply the regular inflection rule to the nonsense word. The percentage is higher of adult subjects. They are applying regular suffixing rule to form the past tense.
Inflections of irregular verbs, on the other hand, are memorized, stored in their memory.
In the human mind, the memory and rule interact in a fairly simple way (Pinker 1999) - if a word can provide its own past tense form from memory, the regular rule is blocked, but elsewhere, by default, the rule applies. That's why adults and children can inflect the nonsense word because there are no memorized inflected forms that is stored in the memory.
A new word "to google", which has no memory stored information on its past tense, has to be inflected in regular form.
(to be continued)
Berko, J. (1958) The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150-177
Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules New York N.Y. : Harper Perrenial
