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According to this abstract, published in 2007, "the half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast." The data that supports this study comes from 177 English irregular verbs, traced over a time span of 1200 years of evolution.

How much is known about verb regularization rates in other languages? Does the data collected so far, for the studied languages, show the same correlation?

Otavio Macedo
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    not that it answers your question (yet!) but as part of my PhD I'm looking at this in Ancient Greek. – James Tauber Oct 02 '11 at 18:04
  • Great! Looking forward to it :-) – Otavio Macedo Oct 02 '11 at 22:12
  • It's going to be a hard one to answer given that you're going to need a 1000 year written history of the language to do that - definitely narrows down the number of languages you can study this phenomenon in! – LaurenG Nov 03 '11 at 11:39
  • @LaurenG Fair enough. I edited the question to make it less demanding. – Otavio Macedo Nov 03 '11 at 12:53
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    @James: That is very interesting! Which dialect(s) are you looking at? Have you found anything interesting yet? I have noticed this particularly in the aorist, where often two stems are possible: an (irregular) thematic stem, and a regularized sigmatic one. Cf. eipon / eleksa, and I believe the passive aorist has several options too (errêthên / elekhthên / elegên ?), which might show that the pseudo-sigmatic aorist is younger than the suppletive forms but older than the regular passive aorist. Or something. – Cerberus Nov 03 '11 at 13:53
  • I too am working on the half life idea as proposed by lieberman, my language of interest is Old Irish. I would be delighted to hear from anyone doing similar work. thanks –  Nov 30 '11 at 11:40
  • Welcome to Linguistics.SE, @GeraldineHerbert! I converted your answer to a comment. But, since you are working on Old Irish, you could share what you have already found on another answer. It would certainly be a great contribution to this question! – Otavio Macedo Nov 30 '11 at 12:53
  • I'm curious as to why verbs are assumed to regularize. Might they not irregularize as well? – dainichi May 31 '12 at 02:06

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German is a language which could probably match English as far as the historical record is concerned, and it is highly likely that studies on regularization rates have been conducted, though I don't have any highly specific references. A good place to start might be:

Fertig, David. Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. 2000

Note, however, that frequency is not the only variable predictive of regularization rate. Another factor identified for English is phonological similarity: i.e. verbs like sing ~ sang will regularize more slowly because of the presence of phonologically similar alternations with other irregular verbs, e.g. ring ~ rang. A reference on this is:

Hare and Elman (1995), "Learning and Morphological change" Cognition 56, 61--98