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Irregularity in language: Saussure versus Chomsky

versus Pinker
STEVEN PINKER, Words and rules: The ingredients of language. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999

Christopher Beedham

To cite this article: Christopher Beedham (2002) Irregularity in language: Saussure versus
Chomsky versus Pinker, Word, 53:3, 341-367, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.2002.11432533

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

Irregularity in language: Saussure versus Chomsky versus Pinker 1

CHRISTOPHER BEEDHAM

STEVEN PINKER, Words and rules: The ingredients of language. London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.

Abstract. Three areas of irregularity in English are considered: irregular

or strong verbs, non-passivizable transitive verbs, and irregular noun plu-
rals, through the eyes particularly of Steven Pinker and his book Words
and rules (and The language instinct), but also as seen in Chomskyan gen-
erative grammar and Saussurean structuralism. Steven Pinker, despite his
professing an allegiance to Chomsky, and claiming to be a psychologist,
not a linguist, turns out to be a brilliant descriptive (i.e. non-generative)
linguist. He shows that the irregular verbs display traits of regularity in that
they fall into "families" based on the consonants and vowels which they
contain, e.g. drink drank, shrink shrank, sink sank. This view ties in with
my own recent work on irregular verbs in a Saussurean-structuralist
framework, which has uncovered regularities concerning the vowel+ con-
sonant sequences (VCs) and consonant+ vowel sequences (CVs) of the
strong verbs of German and English.

1. Introduction. In this review article I want to consider the notion of

irregularity in language by focusing on three instances of irregularity in
English: irregular (strong) verbs; irregular noun plurals; and transitive
verbs which do not form a passive. The immediate impetus for this paper
is Steven Pinker's book, Words and rules, which is about English irreg-
ular verbs. In his book Pinker draws attention to "families" of irregular
verbs according to the particular vowels and consonants which they con-
tain. This idea ties in with my own recent work in a Saussurean-struc-
turalist framework on the vowel+ consonant sequences (VCs) and con-
sonant+ vowel sequences (CVs) of the irregular verbs in German and
English (Beedham 1994b, 1995-6, Ms.). On the basis of these three con-
crete examples we will consider how irregularity in general looks ac-
cording to Chomsky, Saussure, and Pinker.

341
342 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

2. Chomsky's view of irregularity. Chomsky (1986:147) believes

that a generative grammar can capture only the core regularities of lan-
guage, and that there will always be a periphery of exceptions, including
irregular verbs, which can only be listed. On the other hand he also stat-
ed the opposite view when he said in Chomsky (1964:244) that excep-
tions have to be listed separately "unless some more general formulation
can be found to account for them as well. The discovery of such excep-
tions is in itself of little interest or importance (although the discovery of
an alternative formulation in which exceptions disappear would be high-
ly important)". He even attempted to implement this idea in Chomsky
(1965:103-6) when he claimed that transitive verbs which cannot un-
dergo passive also cannot occur with a manner adverbial, and hence he
generated PASSIVE as an optional constituent of the node MANNER. How-
ever, ultimately he sticks to his view that "we will no more give up the
passive transformation, with the extensive simplification of the grammar
to which it leads, because 'Mary married John' has no passive, than
would we give up the general rules ofEqs. (pp. 25-26) for the formation
of regular past tenses, because they fail for take, break, etc." (Chomsky
1964:244). Here Chomsky speaks of the two constructions, tense for-
mation and passive, which are examined in this review article, and
claims that their exceptions, irregular verbs and non-passivizable transi-
tive verbs, have to be listed and cannot be explained. Most generativists,
following Chomsky, adopt this position at the descriptive level, merely
listing exceptions (though any number of devices have been assumed in
order to incorporate them into a given model (see Beedham 1986a)).

3. Objections to the generative enterprise. I have written else-

where about my objections to the generative method. I will not go into
them now in any detail, except to provide a summary which will be nec-
essary in order to understand my comments on Pinker. According to the
generative view the grammarian constructs a formal(ized) grammar
which, it is claimed, explains the structure of language, as well as the
surprisingly rapid and relatively effortless acquisition of language by
children. In line with the "innateness hypothesis", a generative grammar
is a model of the "mind-brain". In my opinion the generative method
makes two interrelated mistakes. Firstly, it allows into science the prac-
tice of making ad hoc assumptions or postulations as a frequent and nor-
mal part of scientific reasoning. Secondly, it imparts to those ad hoc as-
sumptions an air of reality and indeed of scientificness by expressing
them in a formal notation. Although in descriptive gramma~ the notion
of "formal" is crucial, the "formal" of generative grammar is not formal
 REVIEW ARTICLE 343

at all, but merely notational and completely trivial (Beedham 1995b,

2001).
The relevance of this methodological flaw to irregularity and ex-
ceptions is as follows. The analyses of traditional grammar and also of
modem descriptive structuralist grammars have exceptions to their
rules. There is nothing untoward in this, it is only natural. What genera-
tive grammar does is to build into a model and formalize the descriptive
analyses, including their exceptions. But what does that achieve? If one
believes that generative grammar is valid, it achieves a formal explana-
tion. But if one takes the view adumbrated in the paragraph above, it
achieves nothing. All it does is express in a notation a particular descrip-
tive analysis, including the analysis's gaps and anomalies, such as ex-
ceptions (Beedham 1995b:217). In Section 6.1 below we provide a de-
scriptive explanation for non-passivizable transitive verbs, without
recourse to models or notations. And for most of the rest of this review
article we demonstrate, again without recourse to models or notations,
traits of regularity already discernible in the irregular verbs, and show
that there must be still more regularity there waiting to be discovered-
discovered, not postulated-by future research.
We reject the generative method in linguistic analysis; it is obvious
that generative models are most certainly not models of the mind, and in-
nate. Generative grammar fails in linguistics and it fails all the more in
psychology and Pinker's attempt at linguistic genetics.

4. Pinker's The Language Instinct. Pinker (henceforth SP) is best-

known for his 1994 book, The language instinct. It will be as well to look
briefly at that book first, in order to set the scene for an examination of
his later book on irregular verbs. The language instinct is the most inter-
esting, wide-ranging, and funniest book I have ever read. SP wades
through vast territories of intellectual endeavour, penetrating straight to
the heart of the matter in a single phrase, making one blink with surprise,
roar with laughter, or gasp in amazement at every turn. It is exhilarating,
funny, shocking, and always accessible-a wonderful book. 3
The book covers vast swathes of territory: psycholinguistics, SP's
main area of interest, where he describes experiments with human sub-
jects in "the laboratory"; neurolinguistics, with detailed descriptions of
the parts of the brain where language is located; genetics-according to
SP there must be a grammar gene--cf. the title, The language instinct;
psychology, in which the author, like Chomsky, opposes behaviourism
as practised by B. F. Skinner, and the mind as a blank slate; biology,
wherein SP supports Darwin's natural selection as the means by which
344 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

humans acquired language; phonetics and phonology; morphology; the

most accessible account of generative grammar I have ever seen (Ch. 4),
despite the fact that--or probably because-SP himself is not a genera-
tivist (see below in this section); historicallinguistics-Indo-European,
Romance, Germanic, the ur-language; prescriptivism-speakers who
"break the rules" are following a subtle elegance and logic which the
"language mavens", driven by ideology, fail to see-"People are instinc-
tive linguists, assigning a structure to every word" (Pinker 1999: 186);
the Sapir-Whorfhypothesis, which he also believes to be wrong; finally,
anthropology and sociology, where he is critical of much textbook field-
work. Amazingly, SP makes all of this accessible to the general reader,
with jokes, anecdotes, and references to popular culture (e.g. Woodie
Alien films, Peanuts cartoons, rock groups, American baseball). Yet I
still found the book informative in my areas of specialist interest.
In SP's later book, Words and rules, to be reviewed in Section 5
below, there are numerous points of convergence with my own work.
However, there are also numerous fundamental points on which I dis-
agree with SP, many of them coming up in The language instinct. In
order to prepare the ground for a discussion of our points of conver-
gence, I will now attempt to clarify our points of divergence. Let us start
with the notion of the language "instinct" itself. SP is preoccupied with
the existence of a "grammar gene", and perhaps this is only natural,
given that he considers himself to be first and foremost a psycholinguist.
However, as a descriptive grammarian, this issue does not concern me.
There is language and there are languages, providing me with my Un-
tersuchungsobjekt, and that is all that matters to me professionally. How
it and they got there is not relevant to my day-to-day work. Humans have
language and carrots do not, so language is genetic, fine. But it does not
affect my work as a descriptive linguist.
On the other hand it is difficult to remain neutral when SP goes even
further and embraces the notion of a gene for intelligence, a gene for ex-
trovert personality, even a gene for opinions on the death penalty (p.
328). Incidentally, SP claims that his views on genetics are progressive
and liberal, not reactionary and right-wing.
SP expresses passionate support for Chomsky's generative gram-
mar, Universal Grammar, and the innateness hypothesis (telling us in
Pinker ( 1999: 197) that by "the language instinct" he means what Chom-
sky calls Universal Grammar), and as stated in Section 3 above, I beg to
differ on all of that. I also do not accept that one can use psycho linguis-
tic experiments to justify a specific grammatical analysis in the way that
SP does. I disagree with his opposition to structuralism and the Sapir-
 REVIEW ARTICLE 345

Whorfhypothesis (Ch. 3). Furthermore I reject his belief in objective re-

ality (p. 154), and that thought is determined by the bioloF and genet-
ics of the physical brain. Surely we agreed back in the 201 century that
reality is a social, mental, and linguistic construct. But SP believes in ob-
jective reality. On reading this in The language instinct the answer came
to me to a mystery which has puzzled me ever since I first encountered
the works ofNoam Chomsky nearly 30 years ago. And that is, why does
Chomsky never explicitly link his linguistics writings with his political
writings? For it would be a natural thing to do, at least, it would be if you
were a structuralist. In structuralism there is a logical progression from
the notion of structure to the idea that form determines meaning to the
idea that language influences thought to the idea that people's political
views can be manipulated by language (Beedham 1995a:87). But
Chomsky is not a structuralist. He believes that at the bottom of all the
world's diverse languages there lies a single, unifying, mental structure,
a Universal Grammar. It would be illogical for him then to claim that
language can manipulate the mind in order, for example, to make the
American people support the war in Vietnam or intervention in South
America. If the template of grammar is identical to the template of the
mind, and we all have it and indeed are born with it, there is no room for
linguistic manipulation ofthe mind. 4 It is a fault in Chomsky's work that
he does not and cannot link his linguistics with his political writings, and
an indication that something is wrong.
It is a feature of SP's style that he takes an idea to its logical con-
clusion, often with enlightening results, as shown in the previous para-
graph (albeit unintended by SP), though sometimes with absurd results,
without SP realising it, as discussed in the next paragraph.
SP's idea of a neuron in the brain for each irregular verb (318-20) is
highly questionable, for reasons which will emerge in the course of this
article. He says:

What would we see if we could crank up the microscope and peer into the micro-
circuitry of the language areas? No one knows, but I would like to give you an ed-
ucated guess .... I will present you with a dramatization of what grammatical in-
formation processing might be like from a neuron's-eye view. It is not something
that you should take particularly seriously, it is simply a demonstration that the
language instinct is compatible in principle with the billiard-ball causality of the
physical universe, not just mysticism dressed up in a biological metaphor...... .
For irregular verbs like be, this process [of adding the regular 3rd pers. sing.pre-
sent -sending] must be blocked, or else the neural network would produce the in-
correct be's. So the 3sph [3'd pers. sing. habitual aspect] combination neuron also
sends a signal to a neuron that stands for the entire irregular form is. If the person
whose brain we are modeling is intending to use the verb be, a neuron standing for
346 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

the verb be is already active, and it, too, sends activation to the is neuron. Because
the two inputs to is are connected as an AND gate, both must be on to activate is.
That is, if and only if the person is thinking of be and third-person-singular-
present-habitual at the same time, the is neuron is activated. The is neuron inhibits
the -s inflection via a NOT gate formed by an inhibitory synapse, preventing ises
or be's, but activates the vowel i and the consonant z in the bank of neurons stand-
ing for the stem. (Obviously I have omitted many neurons and many connections
to the rest of the brain.) (pp. 319-20) Try to stay with me in this neuro-mytholog-
ical quest: we are beginning to approach the "grammar genes" (p. 321). So do
grammar genes really exist, or is the whole idea just loopy? (p. 322)

Jumping ahead for a moment to Words and rules, SP even specu-

lates as to where exactly in the brain the irregular verbs might be locat-
ed. He gives a diagram of the brain, explaining its different parts and
their functions, and says:

The three clefts [the division of the brain into two hemispheres, left and right; the
central sulcus (fissure); and the Sylvian fissure] provide compass points showing
us where we might look for the neurobiology of regular and irregular inflection.
If regular forms, especially rare and new ones, are processed on the fly by rules,
we might find them computed in the anterior (frontal) portions of the left Sylvian
cortex. If irregular forms are stored as words, we might find them retrieved from
the parietal and temporal portions of the left Sylvian cortex. (Pinker 1999:245)

This makes exciting reading, but since my own view is that the irregu-
larity of the irregular verbs is an artefact of an incorrect analysis, and that
they are in reality regular if we could only find the rule or rules by which
they are formed (see Section 6), then clearly, from my perspective, it is a
wild goose chase to expect to find the irregular verbs anywhere in the
brain at all.
Let us consider the same question from the perspective of another
set of exceptions, non-passivizable transitive verbs, as dealt with in Sec-
tion 6.1 below. Would SP say that there must be a neuron for each non-
passivizable transitive verb? Presumably he would. But we show in Sec-
tion 6.1 that the anomaly and irregularity of non-passivizable transitive
verbs is brought about by an incorrect analysis, the voice analysis of the
passive (the practice of deriving passives from actives). Under the aspect
analysis of the passive there is no such irregularity as non-passivizable
transitive verbs. Therefore there could not possibly be a neuron in the
brain for each such verb. SP's approach is too physical and materialist,
language is abstract and the analysis of language is more abstract still.
But returning to The language instinct, and continuing with my
points of disagreement in preparation for a discussion of my points of
 REVIEW ARTICLE 347

agreement, SP is against a spelling reform in English, I am for it (pp.

188-91). And looking at his bibliography, one sees that his intellectual
world is very narrowly circumscribed, limited to a small circle of people
at MIT, the University of Chicago, and a small number of other Ameri-
cans and generative grammarians, with only a tiny number of non-
American scholars represented.
Finally, the book perpetuates the divide between literature and lin-
guistics. SP gives superb real-life example sentences and texts for the
forms and constructions which he analyses from every walk of life ex-
cept one-serious imaginative literature (apart from a few references to
Shakespeare). But students of linguistics should read and study litera-
ture, not least because literature is an important manifestation of lan-
guage. The literature-linguistics divide is a hangover from a bygone age,
and it is time we ditched it. Literature students need linguistics, and lin-
guistics benefits from literature.
These things I disagree with. But I still stick with my opening posi-
tive comments-it is a profound, exhilarating, and entertaining book,
which I would recommend to anyone and which I do now recommend to
my students. I endorse it on its own merits, though my review of SP's
next book, Words and rules, on irregular verbs in section 5 below will re-
veal more as to how I can enthuse so much about a book with which I
have so many points of disagreement.
SP believes himself to be primarily a psycholinguist. In an inter-
view with the Guardian the interviewing reporter wrote: "He is quick to
point out that he is no linguist. 'Fundamentally, I am a psychologist and
a cognitive scientist. Language is just one branch of cognition."' (Dou-
glas 1999:7). And yet in both The language instinct and Words and rules
it is the linguistic work which is by far the more interesting. Moreover,
SP claims that his main source of inspiration is Noam Chomsky. And yet
there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that SP is not a generativist, he
is a descriptivist. Nowhere, neither in The language instinct nor in Words
and rules, does he commit the generativist's twin errors of mistaking no-
tation for form (believing that to formalize is to explain) and engaging in
systematic ad hoc postulation (see Section 3 above). What he does in
fact (even in Chapter 4 on generative grammar) is to extricate from gen-
erative grammar the descriptive, the data-oriented, the sensible, and pre-
sent that. He omits the more ad hoc postulations, and confines himself
largely to concepts and ideas which are acceptable and understandable
within a descriptive framework. In fact, he is more than just descriptive,
he is actually Saussurean-structuralist in outlook, e.g. talking about
348 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

"Ferdinand de Saussure, a founder of modem linguistics" (Pinker

1999:2), and first identifying a form and then asking what meaning the
form might have (see Section 6.3 below).
There is, of course, a huge irony and paradox 5 in this:
• Chomsky says "language is innate and in the mind" to justify the
generative method in grammatical analysis (cf. Beedham
1995b:184-5);
• Pinker, as a psychologist and someone concerned professionally
primarily with the mind, says "Yes, I agree, language is in the
mind and it is innate";
• Pinker pursues grammatical analysis as a sideline ("I am not a lin-
guist''), but does not take Chomsky's route of the generative
method. He uses instead a descriptive method (which does not
need the innateness hypothesis to justify it).
So Pinker is a descriptivist, but thinks he is a generativist. Does it
matter? Yes, it most certainly does matter. Somebody said that after
reading The language instinct they finally felt they understood "the new
linguistics", i.e. the Chomskyan generative approach. It would be re-
grettable if the brilliance of this book were attributed to the generative
method. The truth is quite the reverse. It is a superb book because it is de-
scriptive, and non-generative.
Another feature of SP's style is that he appears completely natural
and unassuming, even in the full flow of his intellectual depth. All the
better to carry the reader and ease him or her gently into greater under-
standing. The contrast with Chomsky could not be more stark. You read
Chomsky and you feel stupid, because you can't understand him. 6 You
read Pinker and you feel good, because you suddenly understand a
whole lot of things that you didn't before. Chomsky is always portrayed
as a genius. That is why we mortals can't understand him, we are told,
because he is a genius. SP works on the opposite principle. His relaxed
and unpretentious prose allows the reader to reach new insights easily
and naturally.
It is the greatest of ironies that having said all that, there is one fun-
damental point where SP's modesty does obstruct understanding, and
that is the fact that he attributes his approach to Chomsky, even calling
his book after Chomsky's innateness hypothesis, the "language in-
stinct". Chomsky may have inspired SP, that may still be true. But SP is
not a Chomskyan; he is everything but that. It is vital that people under-
stand this point.
What does Chomsky think of SP? The answer is on the back cover
 REVIEW ARTICLE 349

of the Penguin edition of The language instinct. Various sources from

Nature through the Sunday Times to Richard Dawkins say "dazzling ...
words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of
Pinker's investigations", "a marvelously readable book", "does for lan-
guage what DavidAttenborough does for animals", "exhilaratingly bril-
liant'', etc. etc .. Right at the end comes Chomsky: "An extremely valu-
able book, very informative, and very well written". SP is not a
generativist, and Chomsky knows it!

5. Pinker's Words and Rules. Like The language instinct, SP's next
book, Words and rules, is also exhilarating, original, and hilarious. SP
grabs you by the scruff of your mind and hurls you headlong into new in-
sights. He makes you have ideas you didn't know you were capable of
having, think things you didn't know you were capable of thinking.
Again, having said that, there are still many things I disagree with, in
particular towards the end his attempt to locate the irregular verbs in spe-
cific regions of the brain. I think that is sheer folly, verging on the pseu-
do-scientific (see Section 4 above), since my own view is that the irreg-
ularity of the irregular verbs is an artefact of an incorrect analysis, and
that in reality they must be rule-governed, if we could only find the
rule(s) (see Section 6.1 below). But despite all that, once again I stand by
my opening positive comments on this book, too.
Words and rules is about irregular verbs, mainly in English, but with
a chapter on German (see also Marcus et al. 1995)-SP worked on them
for a dozen or so years. SP accepts the well-established notion that reg-
ular past tense formation with -ed in English is rule-governed, whereas
the irregular verb forms such as drank are stored in memory as separate
words (hence the title, Words and rules). He recounts numerous-per-
haps ingenious, perhaps not-psycholinguistic experiments which back
up this point, as well as analyses of the speech of aphasic patients, in-
cluding sufferers of Alzheimer's disease (p. 253), Parkinson's disease
(p. 254), and Huntingdon's disease (pp. 254-5), and the results of brain
scans using techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (p. 265).
All these things feature prominently in the book, as one would expect,
since the author considers himself to be a psycholinguist first and fore-
most. However, I have two problems with this approach. Firstly, I don't
believe that experimental psycholinguistics can confirm or disconfirm
the abstract analyses of grammarians. Secondly, all he does is to confirm
an ancient idea from traditional grammar that irregular verbs are memo-
rized by speakers. We know that already. Or we think we do. My own
view, on the other hand, on irregular verbs is that there must be rules
350 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

there somewhere, if we could only find them, and that is why what in-
terests me most in Words and rules is SP's "families" of irregular verb.
His idea is that irregular verbs are stored in memory as two linked roots,
e.g. drink drank. The roots are linked by what they share, in this case the
consonant cluster dr-, a vowel, and the consonant cluster -nk. In this way
the irregular verbs fall into families or clusters, and exhibit in that sense
a certain degree of regularity (pp. 117-9). SP recounts one psycholin-
guistic experiment in particular which demonstrated that speakers have
an intuitive awareness of such families of irregular verb, viz. when asked
to conjugate made up verbs such as to spling, 80% of people said spling
splang splung, because, SP claims, they link it up with the similar-
sounding family spring sprang sprung, ring rang rung (pp. 84-5) (see
Section 5.5 below).
Irregularity in language, and particularly irregular verbs, holds a
special place in the hearts and minds of ordinary people, not just lin-
guists. SP says:

Irregularity in grammar seems like the epitome of human eccentricity and quirk-
iness. Irregular forms are explicitly abolished in 'rationally designed' languages
like Esperanto, Orwell's Newspeak, and Planetary League Auxiliary Speech in
Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Time for the Stars. (p. 141)

And he comments:

Regular and irregular words have long served as metaphors for the law-abiding
and the quirky. Psychology textbooks point to children's errors like breaked and
goed as evidence that we are a pattern-loving, exception-hating species ....... In
1984 George Orwell has the state banning irregular verbs as a sign of its determi-
nation to crush the human spirit. (p. 21)

5.1. Families of irregular verb. SP considers Chomsky and Halle's

account of irregular verbs in The sound pattern of English, and rejects it
as implausible (pp. 92-103). He then considers an approach to irregular
verbs by the psychologists David Rumelhart and James McClelland
(1986) known as the "artificial neural network model" or "parallel dis-
tributed processing" or "connectionism" (pp. 103-9), which works as
follows:

The model is trained on a list of verbs and their past-tense forms, presented over
and over and over. A given connection will be buffeted up and down by successive
verbs in a training run, but eventually it will settle on the strength value that does
the best job, in combination with the other connections, of producing correct past-
tense forms. The network's knowledge of the various verbs and their past-tense
 REVIEW ARTICLE 351

forms is smeared across the 211,600 connection strengths; one cannot point to a
circumscribed part of the network that implements a particular word, a particular
iregular family, or a regular rule.
Rumelhart and McClelland trained their network on a list of 420 verbs pre-
sented 200 times, for a total of 84,000 trials. To everyones's surprise, the model
did quite well, computing most of the correct sound stretches for all 420 verbs.
(pp. 107-8)

But SP rejects it (pp. 109-17), largely because connectionism can-

not handle his families of irregular verb:

Pattern associator memories ... cannot exploit the basic gadget of computation
called a variable. A variable such as "verb" can stand for an entire class of items,
regardless of their phonological content. That allows a rule to copy over the ma-
terial of a stem and simply hang a suffix on it, whatever it is. A pattern associator,
in contrast, has to be painstakingly trained with items bearing every input feature
in the class. If a new item bearing a novel combination of features is presented, the
model cannot automatically copy over the combination; it activates bits and
pieces that are vaguely associated with the features and coughs them up in a hair-
ball. (p. 144)

His own solution, he says, is a hybrid of Chomsky and Halle ( 1991) and
Rumelhart and McClelland:

Regular verbs are computed by a rule that combines a symbol for a verb stem with
a symbol for the suffix. Irregular verbs are pairs of words retrieved from the men-
tal dictionary, a part of memory. Here is the twist: Memory is not a list of unrelat-
ed slots ... but is associative, a bit like the Rumelhart-McClelland pattern associ-
ator memory. Not only are words linked to words, but bits of words are linked to
bits of words. The bits are ... substructures like stems, onsets, rimes, vowels,
consonants, and features ... .
Furthermore, the nodes of one word (such as string) overlap the same nodes in
other words (such as sling, stick, stink, and swim). As a result, irregular verbs
show the kinds of associative effects found in a connectionist pattern associator.
People find families of similar irregular verbs easier to store and recall because
these verbs repeatedly strengthen their shared associations. And people occasion-
ally generalize the irregular patterns to new, similar verbs, because the new verbs
contain material that already had been associated with the pattern from the old
verbs. (pp. 117-8)

Continuing the idea of families of irregular verbs, SP says:

The irregular verbs are shot through with patterns:

blow-blew, grow-grew, know-knew, throw-threw
bind-bound, find-found, grind-ground, wind-wound
drink-drank, shrink-shrank, sink-sank, stink-stank
bear-bore, swear-swore, tear-tore, wear-wore (p. 83)
352 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

He writes:

What are the facts to be explained? Irregular verbs defy the suggestion that they
are memorized by rote because they show three kinds of patterning.
First, irregular past-tense forms are similar in sound to their base forms. For
example, drink and drank share, d, r, a vowel, n, and k, the only difference is that
drank has the vowel a where drink has the vowel i.... Let's call this pattern stem-
past similarity.
Second, a few kinds of change from a stem to its past are seen over and over
among the 164 irregular verbs. The i-a-u pattern in drink-drank-drunk, for exam-
ple, is found, with variations, in sing-sang-sung, sit-sat-sat, begin-began-begun,
shrink-shrank-shrunk, and twenty other verbs. Similarly, we have freeze-froze,
speak-spoke, and steal-stole; bleed-bled, breed-bred, and feed-fed; teach-taught,
fight-fought, and bring-brought. Let's call this pattern, in which the change from
stem to past in one verb is similar to the change from stem to past in another verb,
change-change similarity.
Third, the verbs undergoing a given irregular change are far more similar than
they have to be. If you are a verb and want to undergo the i-a-u pattern, all you re-
ally need is ani. But the verbs that do follow the pattern (drink, spring, shrink, and
so on) have much more in common; most begin with a consonant cluster like st-,
str-, dr-, sl-, or cl-, and most end in -ng or -nk . ... People extend old patterns to
new verbs, as in bring-brang, fight-fit, and spling-splung, only when the new verb
is highly similar to old ones in memory. We need an explanation of why the
human mind is so impressed by similarity in sound; let's call this pattern stem-
stem similarity.
A theory with rules for irregular verbs, as well as regular ones, could explain
all three kinds of patterning. Imagine a rule that said, "If a verb has the sound con-
sonant-consonant-i-ng, change i to u" (Pinker 1999:90-1).

SP's families of irregular verb tie in closely with my own findings

regarding the VCs and CVs of irregular verbs (see Section 6.2 below).
Through psycholinguistic experiments SP has reached a conclusion
similar to the one that I reached via lexico-grammatical experiments.
In support of his view that the irregular verbs are in part rule-
governed SP treats us to a panoply of historical, dialectal, structural, and
psycholinguistic observations which are so apposite and so lucidly pre-
sented that they captivate and fascinate you. Let us now look at some of
those observations.

5.2. Historical evidence. Although in general it is true that the num-

ber of irregular verbs in English has declined over the centuries-Old
English had 325 strong verbs, modem English has 164, so in general the
tendency is for strong verbs to become weak (p. 80)-that is by no
means the end of the story. Many verbs have crossed over in the opposite
direction from weak to strong, including: ring-rang, dig-dug, stick-
 REVIEW ARTICLE 353

stuck, wear-wore, show-shown, fling-flung, sling-slung, light-lit, creep-

crept, kneel-knelt, dive-dove, catch-caught, quit-quit, sneak-snuck.
Many verbs have switched from one strong class to another, e.g. slay-
slew, draw-drew (originally drough) (p. 84).
Two questions arise. Firstly, given the fact that the strong forms can
be traced back to Proto-Indo-European at least 5,500 years ago, why
have as many as 164 strong verbs survived so long? They must be very
"strong" indeed, to stay with Jacob Grimm's original metaphor and rea-
son for calling them "strong". Surely if there were really nothing to them
but bizarre unmotivated irregularity they would all have disappeared by
now. Secondly, why has there been any drift at all in the opposite direc-
tion, from weak to strong? SP's answer is his families of irregular verb. 7
Incidentally, although SP deals a lot with the history of languages,
he does still manage to maintain a Saussurean separation of synchrony
and diachrony, which is very unusual today. That is to say, he does not
give solely an historical explanation of the irregular verbs, and say:
"This is the history of the irregular verbs. That is why they are in the lan-
guage today. End of story." Of course, in one sense the historical account
or explanation is perfectly valid. Their history is indeed in one sense
why they are in the language today. But what I am after is a
logical/grammatical/structural explanation for what they are doing in
the language today, and what SP is after is a "psycholinguistic" account
of what they do. SP's separation of synchrony and diachrony comes out
most clearly in a section on irregular noun plurals in English, where he
says that speakers distinguish between canonical English words and for-
eign borrowings when assigning to a foreign borrowing a regular plural
with -s. He says: "Modem English speakers, of course, do not have a col-
lective memory of the cadences of an ancient Saxon fatherland. There
must be a source in a speaker's own experience for the inkling that a
word is not of native stock" (p. 156).

5.3. Regional dialects. All regional dialects have their own idiosyn-
cratic survivals of older forms, e.g. help-holp, tell-tale, melt-malt, swell-
swole (p. 70), show-shew, saw-sew, sow-sew, snow-snew (p. 72), climb-
clumb, shake-shuck, take-tuck, dive-duv, drive-druv (p. 76) (Mencken
1986). Furthermore, as in the film Honey, I shrunk the kids, "most people
say shrunk, sprung, sunk, and stunk, not shrank, sprang, sank, and stank"
(p. 77). Moreover, they are not all historical vestiges; "many, if not most,
are home-grown products of the creativity of local speakers: bring-
brang-brung, dive-div, chide-chode, snow-snew, climb-clomb, drag-
drug, slide-slud,fling-flung, and literally hundreds of others" (p. 84).
354 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

Once again, we see that the irregular patterns are alive and well, and
to the forefront of people's consciousness. SP comments:

The irregular patterns refuse to die. Irregular verbs are supposed to be a list of ar-
bitrary words memorized by rote, just like duck and walk, with only a trace of pat-
terning left behind by long-defunct rules. Instead, people extract the patterns and
extend them to new words, just as they do with the regular pattern in errors like
breaked, in neologisms like mashed, and in the wug-test. The distinction between
regular and irregular inflection, and therefore between words and rules, is not so
clear anymore. Either the irregular patterns are generated by rules, just like the
regular pattern, or linguistic productivity does not depend on rules in the first
place but can arise from words via some ability to associate the patterns in known
words with the patterns in new ones. (p. 87)

5.4. The language of children. It is well known that children over-

generalize the regular past tense -ed morpheme, making weak verbs out
of strong, to produce incorrect forms such as breaked (instead of broke)
and goed (instead of went). SP is brilliant at presenting the latest re-
search by psychologists in this area in a lively, funny, and yet intellectu-
ally probing way. Many parents try to correct their children's regularized
irregular verbs, but it is to no avail, children always stick to their guns.
SP gives an example from a cartoon which appeared in a newspaper:
CHILD: Mommy, Dolly hitted me.
MOTHER: Dolly HIT me.
CHILD: You too? Boy, she's in trouble. (p. 195)
A real life example, transcribed by a psychologist, is:
CHILD: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
ADULT: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
CHILD: Yes.
ADULT: What did you say she did?
CHILD: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
ADULT: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: No, she holded them loosely. (p. 196)
We pay a lot of attention to children's mistakes with strong verbs,
but the truth is, the average error rate is only 4%. 96% of the time the
child utters the correct irregular past tense form, like sang (p. 199).
Moreover:

In more controlled studies children are asked to judge the past tense forms of a
language-impaired puppet. They let many errors slip by, but they object to errors
more often than to correct forms. And when asked to choose, the children, on av-
erage, prefer the correct forms. All this suggests that children really do know ir-
 REVIEW ARTICLE 355

regular past tense forms like went and read; their errors must be slip-ups in which
they cannot slot an irregular form into a sentence in real time. (p. 200)

5.5. Psycholinguistic experiments. SP emphasises his role as psy-

chologist:
Any drudge can go over the list of irregular verbs in the preceding chapter and
write down a set of tedious rules for them .... But that would be no improvement
over the original list of verbs. A theory invoking the rules must be more than a
summary of the patterns among the verbs. It should be a psychological theory, a
hypothesis of the format in which children acquire words, and an explanation of
why verbs have the kinds of patterns they do. The trick is to find a compact set of
rules that captures the generalizations the mind likes to make. (p. 92)

A few pages earlier he recounts Bybee and Moder's experiment with the
made-up verb to spling:

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything un-

less it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To my knowl-
edge no one has yet studied irregular verbs in rats, but the linguists Joan Bybee
and Carol Moder have studied them in sophomores and have shown that they are
all too happy to generalize irregular patterns to novel verbs. They asked the stu-
dents in a university linguistics course (non only sophomores, of course) to write
down the past-tense forms of existing and made-up verbs, completing sentences
such as Sam likes to spling. Yesterday he---. Almost 80 percent ofthe subjects
offered splang or splung. Even when given real words, some of the subjects were
tempted by irregular patterns and came up with creative forms such as dig-dag,
sting-stang, slink-stank, streak-strack, skid-skud, and clip-clap. Bybee and
Moder may have duplicated in the laboratory the process that gave us forms like
fling-flung and drag-drug in the history of English. (By bee and Mod er 1983) (pp.
84-5)

5.6. Pinker's conclusion. Pinker's (1999: 154) conclusion from all of

the above is that speakers must associate the irregular preterit of a verb
with its irregular infinitive, i.e. the two are linked in the mental lexicon.
The two things that are linked, he says, are word roots:
A canonical ... root embodies Ferdinand de Saussure's conception of the lin-
guistic sign as an arbitrary pairing between a meaning and a sound, one of the
foundations of modem linguistics discussed in chapter 1....
And here is the key to irregularity. An irregular plural or past-tense form is a
root linked to another root: sank to sink, feet to foot:

V V N _
Nplural
~-~past
1 1
sink sank foot feet
356 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

Regrettably SP omits to mention how he would treat the second parti-

ciple.
One of the things that this idea explains is the fact that ono-
matopoeic verbs are always regular, never irregular:

Onomatopoeic verbs and nouns need past tense and plural forms, but because
they are not canonical roots, they cannot tap into the lexicon of roots and linked
irregular forms that encourage irregular analogies. Onomatopoeic forms there-
fore are regular, even when their sound would otherwise tempt people to borrow
an irregular pattern, spling-splang-splung style:
The engine pinged [not pang or pung]
The canary peeped [not pept]
Her computer beeped [not bept] (p. 155)

Another phenomenon which it explains is the fact that verbs derived

from nouns are also always regular, never irregular:

Verbs that are recognized as thinly disguised nouns or adjectives don't accept ir-
regular forms, even when they sound like an irregular verb:
Boom-Boom Geoffrion got high-sticked! [not high-stuck] 8
Powell ringed the city with artillery.
I steeled myself for a visit with my dentist, Dr. de Sade.
Mongo spitted the pig.
Vern on braked for the moose.
Babs quickly righted the canoe.
Most snow or sugar snap peas need to be stringed.
The explanation is that a noun root like stick cannot have an irregular past
tense associated with it because the concept of past tense makes no sense for a
noun and hence cannot be listed with it. ... The irregular past-tense form stuck
that is stored with the verb root stick is not treated as relevant, because to high-
stick doesn't have that root. The regular rule is not restricted to verb roots or to
anything else, but applies by default. The rule therefore is fully available-indeed
is the only way-to inflect verbs without verb roots. (p. 158)

These last two explanations-of onomatopoeic verbs and verbs de-

rived from nouns always being regular-are ones which I used in my
own work on the VCs and CVs of irregular verbs (see Section 6.2
below).

5.7. Pinker and the "method of lexical exceptions". Let us stand

back for a moment and look at what SP has done. Chomsky said excep-
tions are not capturable in a grammar, at the descriptive level they have
to be listed (leaving aside the fact that if one believes in the generative
method one can assume a device and formalize it in order to incorporate
 REVIEW ARTICLE 357

exceptions into a particular model). Yet SP spent a dozen years of his life
investigating the most renowned and intractable set of exceptions known
to man, the irregular verbs. I know of a parallel case. I spent three years
of my life (in 1976-79) investigating another well-known set of excep-
tions, non-passivizable transitive verbs (see Section 6.1 below). Out of
that research came what I call the "method of lexical exceptions", and I
am following it up with my own study of irregular verbs, as my second
lot of unexplained lexical exceptions (I daren 't say for how many years
so far!). SP has done what I did. He has used a set of unexplained lexical
exceptions as a way in to obtain deeper insights into a grammatical phe-
nomenon. The only difference between us is that I started out with non-
passivizable transitive verbs and moved on to irregular verbs later,
whereas SP started out with irregular verbs. Once again we see a basic
Saussurean--not Chomskyan--element in SP's approach.

6. Saussurean structuralism. Let us now see how irregularity looks

from a Saussurean-structuralist perspective. According to Saussure a
language is a structure or system whose units are determined by their
place in the system, not by virtue of "referring" to "objective reality".
Three things follow from this. Firstly, form, meaning, and syntax 9 are
mutually interdependent, and in particular, there is a one-to-one rela-
tionship between form and meaning (i.e. all forms carry a meaning),
moreover, form determines meaning. Secondly, a descriptive grammar-
ian's analysis, including those of traditional grammar, is a theory or hy-
pothesis only, not a statement of obvious facts, and is to be replaced by
a better (descriptive) analysis if one can be found. Thirdly, unexplained
exceptions are introduced into grammars by grammarians' incorrect
analyses, they are not really there in the inherent structure of language.
An analysis which produces a large number of unexplained exceptions
must therefore to that extent be wrong (Saussure 1983; Beedham 1986b,
1995a; Tobin 1990, 1993).

6.1. Non-passivizable transitive verbs. In Beedham 1982 I pro-

posed an explanation of non-passivizable transitive verbs within a Saus-
surean-structuralist framework. 10 The verb is traditionally said to have
two voices, active and passive, whereby actives and passives are consid-
ered to be (cognitively) synonymous, passives are derived from actives,
and it is thought that all and only transitive verbs form a passive. Under
this analysis verbs which are transitive and yet which do not form a pas-
sive have to be listed, since they cannot be explained. I proposed that this
voice analysis of the passive is wrong, and that the passive is actually an
358 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

aspect of the verb, like the perfect. The actional passive means "action+
state", and the ability of a verb to passivize is determined by the lexical
aspect of the verb and by the compositional aspect of the sentence. All
verbs which are not passivizable, whether transitive or intransitive, have
a lexical aspect which following Poupynin 1996 may be called "atermi-
native". Recognising the fact that some non-passivizable transitive verbs
will passivize under certain condition, sentences which cannot be con-
verted into the passive contain a compositional aspect which following
Schoorlemmer 1995 may be called "atelic". The main evidence-and it
is syntactic evidence-in support of this aspectual analysis of the pas-
sive is the fact that approximately two-thirds of non-passivizable transi-
tive verbs also cannot form a resultative perfect, e.g. to have and to re-
semble, though not to marry, as shown in (1)-(3) below:

(la) John has a new car.

(lb) *A new car is had by John.

(le) John has had a new car.

(2a) Fiona resembles Catriona.

(2b) ?Catriona is resembled by Fiona.

(2c) Fiona has resembled Catriona.

(3a) Mary married John.

(3b) ?John was married by Mary.

(3c) Mary has married John.

In (1)-(3) the (a) sentences show that the verb in question is transitive,
i.e. followed by a direct object, and should therefore, according to the
voice analysis (the practice of deriving passives from actives), passivize.
The (b) sentences show that the verbs in question are not, in fact, pas-
sivizable. The (c) sentences are all perfects, but in the case of ( 1) and (2)
they are not interpretable as resultative perfects (with the meaning "ac-
tion + result"), they are interpretable only as experiential perfects. Sen-
tence (3c) on the other hand is a resultative perfect, and is given here to
reflect the one-third proportion of non-passivizable transitive verbs
 REVIEW ARTICLE 359

which do form a resultative perfect. Each of these latter verbs has an

idiosyncratic lexical semantics which leads it to be excluded from the
perfect-passive correlation outlined here.
The reason why most non-passivizable transitive verbs do not form
a resultative perfect is that the actional passive meaning "action + state"
and the resultative perfect meaning "action + result" are very similar.
The same aterminative semantics that renders a transitive verb incom-
patible with the actional passive also renders it-or most of them, any-
way-incompatible with the resultative perfect.
Thus the structural explanation for the irregular and exceptional
non-passivizable transitive verbs is that they are an artificial creation of
the voice analysis, and that an aspect analysis does not produce them.
Passivizability is determined not by transitivity but by lexical and com-
positional aspect: some transitive verbs do not form a passive either be-
cause they are aterrninative or because the sentence in which they appear
is atelic (Beedham 1981, 1982, 1998). It is not the case that the excep-
tions are genuinely there in the actual structure of language. Rather, we
grammarians got it wrong-the passive is not a voice of the verb, it is an
aspect of the verb. 11

6.2. Strong verb VCs and CVs. After completing my research on

non-passivizable transitive verbs it seemed natural to try to repeat the
methodology-! called it "the method of lexical exceptions"-on an-
other area of grammar. I cast around for a suitable construction, looking
for a construction which had an unusually large number of unexplained
exceptions, analogous to the passive and non-passivizable transitive
verbs, and very quickly settled on irregular or strong verbs. Strong verbs
are irregular with respect to tense formation. The overwhelming major-
ity of English verbs, the so-called weak verbs, form their preterit and
second participle in a regular manner with -ed, e.g. work worked
worked. A small but substantial number of verbs on the other hand form
an irregular preterit and second participle with ablaut and no -ed. Strong
or irregular verbs presented the ideal analogue to non-passivizable tran-
sitive verbs (see Beedham 1989, 1994a).
Most irregular verbs are monosyllabic. Thus monosyllabic is a
structural feature of irregular verbs. In 1991192 I extracted all regular
monosyllabic verbs from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
(OALD), in total 1,768 verbs. These regular verbs were then compared
with a list of the irregular verbs, 126 in all. For a long time no differences
between the two lists were apparent. But then I noticed a difference with
regard to vowel+ consonant sequences (VCs) and consonant+ vowel se-
360 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

quences (CVs), e.g. in sing [IIJ] and [si].It became apparent that the VCs
and CV s of the strong verbs occurred only in small numbers in the weak
verb list. Moreover, for those few weak verbs where they did occur there
were special reasons for their being there, to do with their being derived
from nouns, or else being onomatopoeic. For example, there are four
strong verb forms with the VC [reiJ]: hang, rang, sang, sprang. Given
that there are 14 times as many verbs in the weak verb list as in the strong
verb list one would expect that [rei]] would occur in the weak verb list
frequently. But it doesn't; in fact there were only 6 weak verbs with [reiJ]:
bang, clang, gang, prang, slang, and twang. Whereas all 4 strong verbs
with [rei]] are base (i.e. not derived) verbs, 4 out of the 6 weak verbs with
[rei]] are derived from nouns: clang, gang, slang, and twang. These verbs
could not possibly undergo ablaut, i.e. be strong verbs, because they
only exist by virtue of their link with the noun from which they derive. In
other words they only exist by a kind of fluke, viz. by being derived from
nouns. Moreover, the remaining two verbs out of the 6 weak verbs with
[rei]], bang and prang, are onomatopoeic or phonaesthetic, and by virtue
of this special feature also precluded from ablaut. If it weren't for the
special circumstances of derivation from a noun and onomatopoeia there
would be no monosyllabic weak verbs with [rei]] in the language at all.
This pattern repeated itself across most of the VCs and CV s in the strong
verb list. The same pattern was found to apply to German. The in-
escapable conclusion is that the VCs and CV s of the strong verbs are in
effect unique to the strong verbs and hence serve as phonological mark-
ers of strong conjugation (Beedham 1994b, 1995-96).
In 1999 I conducted another lexico-grammatical experiment. This
time I searched for the strong verb VCs and CVs in monosyllabic words
other than verbs, again using the OALD. Again, at first no particular pat-
tern was discernible. But then a distinction was observed between lexi-
cal words such as nouns and adjectives on the one hand, and grammati-
cal words such as pronouns and conjunctions on the other. Then a
pattern came to light. It transpired that 72% of the monosyllabic gram-
matical words listed in the OALD contain strong verb VCs. 12 The ten-
dency was most noticeable with personal pronouns, where 13 out of 15
pronouns(= 87%) have a strong verb VC.

(4) Thirteen English personal pronouns with a strong verb VC:

he
her
him
I
 REVIEW ARTICLE 361

it
me
she
thee
them
they
we
ye
you

(5) Two English personal pronouns without a strong verb VC:

thou
us

(Note that the notion of consonant here includes zero consonant, e.g. the
pronouns he, her, I all end with a zero consonant, as do the irregular verb
forms see, were, buy.) The same pattern was found to apply to German,
with a proportion of 64% instead of 72% (see Beedham Ms.). Here a
phonotactic link between strong verbs and grammatical words has been
established. The next question is: Does the link go deeper than phono-
tactics; could it have a morphological and semantic or even syntactic
basis to it? 13 I have no answer as yet to this question, but the regularities
unearthed so far point to the possibility that rules governing the forma-
tion of the "irregular" verbs can be found, and that the apparently weird-
looking forms of the irregular verbs will turn out to be meaningful. My
hope is that we will one day be able to fit the irregular verbs into a Saus-
surean system of the verb in modem English and German, in a manner
already accomplished for non-passivizable transitive verbs. 14

6.3. Pinker as a structuralist. There is a striking similarity between

SP's families of irregular verb and the VC/CV patterns described in Sec-
tion 6.2 above, even down to the detail of verb-from-noun derivation and
onomatopoeia. So how is it that a Chomskyan psycholinguist like Pinker
and a descriptive structuralist like myself converge in these observations
and conclusions? The answer is not just because Pinker is not a Chom-
skyan, and his descriptive work is more interesting than his psycholin-
guistics, as argued earlier (Section 4). It is also because Pinker is at heart
a structuralist. But what is a structuralist? One of the main characteris-
tics of structuralists is that they identify a form, and then ask' "What
meaning could this form have?". Early on in Words and rules Pinker dips
a toe in this water, but then gets cold feet and withdraws. He asks:
362 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

"Could we reduce the difference between regular and irregular verbs to

a difference in meaning between the two kinds of verbs ... ?" (p. 42).
This is precisely my own Saussurean-structuralist approach to the irreg-
ular verbs. My working hypothesis is that there is indeed such a seman-
tic difference-the formal differences between regular and irregular
verbs are not there for nothing, they are there for a reason, a semantic
reason-but we can only get to that meaning via a study of form. SP
does not do this for the irregular verbs, but he does do it for irregular
noun plurals, e.g.feet, women, mice. In particular, he does it for the plur-
al of mouse in the compound noun computer-mouse. SP asks, why is it
that the noun mouse in the sense of 'computer mouse' appears not to
have a plural? It certainly isn't mouses, there is no question of that, but
is it mice? The answer is: No, it is not. People feel uncomfortable with
mice as the plural of mouse in the sense of 'computer mouse'. They ei-
ther avoid it altogether if possible or else use a circumlocution like data
input devices. Why? Why are we uncomfortable with it? The answer that
SP most convincingly suggests is a semantic and Saussurean-structural-
ist one. He says:

Suppose the regular plural suffix -s simply means "more than one of," so that
hands= "more than one" + "hand" and rats= "more than one" +"rat." But sup-
pose that no single concept of plurality is shared by all the irregular plurals. They
have to be stored separately in memory anyway because of their idiosyncratic
sounds, and that means each can have its own meaning slot in which a unique,
concrete representation of more-than-one-of-that-kind-of-thing can be entered. It
could even be a mental image of a typical multitude of that kind of thing: a com-
mittee of men or women, a flock of geese, a pair of feet, a set of teeth, a brood of
children, a team of oxen, an infestation of lice.
Consider now what happens when you are called on to refer to more than one
pointing device. Pointing devices come one to a computer, and several of them
would imply several computers. But several little rodents tend to scurry, unat-
tached, throughout the house or in meadows and woods. The metaphorical apt-
ness of "mouse: the single rodent" for "mouse: the single pointing device" evap-
orates when we now have to think of "mice: the scattered vermin" as a metaphor
for "mice: the accessory attached to each of several computers." And that, I sub-
mit, makes people uneasy about calling the pointing devices mice. (p. 176)

He goes on:

Often it's unclear whether a multitude is best perceived as one big thing or many
little things, as we see in expressions like "He can't see the forest for the
trees" .... Whenever a collection of individual things is reconceptualized as a sin-
gle gestalt, the plural for that collection can cease to feel like a plural, and the lan-
guage can change.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 363

... The linguist Peter Tiersma has found that whenever a set of objects can
easily be construed as a single assemblage, a regular plural is in danger of con-
gealing into a mass noun or an irregular plural. 15 This is happening today to the
noun data, which often refers to large quantities of information and which is eas-
ily conceived of as stuff rather than things: the word is turning from a plural (many
data) to a mass noun (much data). The effect is wide-spread. In language after
language things that come in groups, such as children, gregarious animals, and
paired or clustered body parts, end up unmarked, irregular, or transformed into a
singular, sometimes to get pluralized all over again by a subsequent generation of
speakers. (pp. 177-8)

So irregular noun plurals have their own meaning, different to that of the
regular plural with -s. Moreover, the different meaning which the irreg-
ular plurals have is determined by their having a different form to the
regular plurals. This is pure unadulterated Saussurean structuralism, and
it is what I am trying to do with the irregular verbs. Why do we say in En-
glish drank instead of *drinked? There must be a meaning conveyed by
drank which the regular version, if it existed, would not or could not
carry. Meanings are not self-evident, they have to be discovered (Beed-
ham 1995a:83; Tobin 1990:65, 79-80), and I am attempting to discover
the meaning(s) ofthe irregular verbs.

6.4. Tobin and Quirk on irregular verbs. Yishai Tobin claims that
in English, the modern Romance languages, and Hebrew, the irregular
verbs are result-oriented, whilst the regular verbs are process-oriented
(Tobin 1993:336-49). This is the kind of structuralist and semantic des-
tination that I eventually want to arrive at myself. However, there is a
problem with it, and that is, what is the proof of this semantic distinc-
tion?16 Tobin assesses the meanings of certain lexical items in the rele-
vant languages, and points to numerous elements of process orientation
in regular verbs, and result orientation in irregular verbs. But it is based
on intuition. It is based on an intuitive assessment of the meanings of
certain lexical items. But we need formal proof, e.g. syntactic, morpho-
logical, phonotactic. Not just because that is the best way to persuade
people of your semantic assessment, but because that is where the se-
mantics comes from in the first place-remember: form determines
meaning. Randolph Quirk has said that the difference between burnt and
burned, smellt and smelled etc. is perfective versus durative: the irregu-
lar -t version is perfective, whilst the regular -ed version is durative
(Quirk 1970; Quirk et al. 1985: 106). This again is the kind of place I
want to be at the end of my research, and Quirk's assessment fits in ex-
tremely well with Tobin's assessment, viz. Quirk's perfective matches
364 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

Tobin's result-orientation for the irregular verbs, and Quirk's durative

matches Tobin's process-orientation for the regular verbs. However, the
problem with Quirk's thesis is that it too relies on an intuitive assessment
(this time by informants) of the meaning of forms for its proof or plausi-
bility. Like Tobin and Quirk, I too believe that there must be a semantic
basis to the difference between regular and irregular verbs, but I am try-
ing to get at that difference via formal means, by studying and investi-
gating in detail the formal-i.e. syntactic, morphological, phonotactic,
etc.-properties of the irregular verbs.

7. Summary and Conclusion. In this review of SP's book Words

and rules on English irregular verbs I have attempted to consider gram-
matical irregularity in general from a Chomskyan, Saussurean, and
Pinkerian point of view. My own Saussurean perspective is that irregu-
larity in language, far from being something that we should ossify in a
sterile notational model, Chomsky-style, presents researchers with a
route-the "method oflexical exceptions"-by which they can arrive at
new analyses which capture greater generalizations. I have used that
route once already, focusing on the irregular-i.e. under the voice analy-
sis of the passive irregular-non-passivizable transitive verbs to arrive at
a new, aspectual analysis of the passive which eliminates the very non-
passivizable transitive verbs that one started out with. And I am attempt-
ing to go down that route again, this time investigating verbs with an ir-
regular tense formation, the so-called "strong" or irregular verbs.
Although SP considers himself to be first and foremost a psycho linguist,
and a Chomskyan, he is actually nothing of the sort. Rather, he is a de-
scriptive linguist, a brilliant and entertaining one, and a Saussurean-
structuralist. He too sees irregularity in language as an opening for em-
pirical research, not as a dead-end. He shows convincingly that the
irregular verbs are alive and well in modem English, that speakers clas-
sify them into "families", depending on the vowels and consonants that
they contain, and that consequently they are not individually memorised
irregular exceptions, but are in part rule-governed and regular. I have
pointed out a similarity between SP's vowel and consonant based fami-
lies of irregular verb and my own recent unearthing of regularities on the
irregular verbs based on the vowel + consonant sequences that they con-
tain. I have no idea where this discovery will take us, but that's science.
Ifl could tell you in advance what the next discovery will be it would not
be much of a discovery. What I do know, or believe anyway, is that some-
where at the end of the journey are a meaning or meanings for the irreg-
ular verbs and a rule or rules for their formation. On that journey one
 REVIEW ARTICLE 365

could have no better companion than SP's Words and rules, together
with his Language instinct. Despite the numerous points of disagree-
ment I have with these two books, the fact remains that there has surely
never been a scientist or scholar ever who is at once so wide-ranging, so
profound, so exciting, so accessible, and so entertaining as Steven
Pinker.
Department of German,
University of St Andrews,
Buchanan Building,
StAndrews,
Fife KY16 9PH
United Kingdom
c.beedham@st-andrews.ac.uk

END NOTES

1
A version of this paper was presented to the St Andrews Institute of Language and Linguistic
Studies (SAILLS}, St Andrews (Scotland}, on I 0 April 2000. I am grateful to Wendy Anderson for
drawing my attention to the relevance of Pinker's work to my own, to Chris Gledhill and Michael
Ward for discussion of the issues raised.
2
Descriptive grammar is analytical and explanatory, not "taxonomic" as the generativists
would have it.
3
A few days before giving this paper to SAILLS I happened to meet a professional translator
who told me that she had been reading The language instinct on the train and had become so en-
grossed in it that she missed her stop. When I was reading it, at one point my daughter came into the
study and asked what I was laughing at. She was amazed to hear that it was at a book on linguistics.
4
Although he could perhaps claim that it is only the surface structure of language which ma-
nipulates, the deep structure (or D-structure) remains the same for all of us.
5
The version of this paper presented to SAILLS bore the alternative title: "The paradox of
Steven Pinker".
6
The key to understanding Chomsky is to understand why he is wrong. For which see
Section 3.
7
My answer is there must be a rule and a meaning-see Section 6.
8
To high-stick means 'to hit with a high stick', an expression from ice-hockey. The explanation
is the same for Hefiied out (an expression from baseball}, i.e. it is a verb derived from a noun, a fly-
out.
9
Syntax in the sense of combinatorial possibilities (not word order).
1
~eedham 1982 is my Salford/Leipzig Ph. D. thesis. The topic of my Ph. D. was non-pas-
sivizable transitive verbs. It was an investigation of these verbs which led me to the aspectual analy-
sis of the passive.
11
Historical linguists should now reexamine the passive in earlier stages of Germanic and
Slavonic to see to what extent the passive was already an aspect in earlier centuries. Having estab-
lished that, they should then chart the change from one synchronic state to another synchronic state,
in the classic Saussurean manner.
12
The generalisation was found not to apply to the CVs.
13
It cannot be simply because the grammatical words, like the strong verbs, are the older words
366 WORD, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER, 2002)

of the language. The link of the kind discovered would not have maintained itself across 5,500 years
of linguistic change and development if there were no semantic or functional basis to it.
14
If and when that day arrives, again historical linguists will need to reexamine the strong verbs
in earlier stages of Germanic to see to what extent the new analysis in the modem language already
applied to earlier centuries. It doing so it will be important to maintain the Saussurean separation of
synchrony and diachrony.
15
Tiersma 1982; Bybee 1985.
16
In a sense the formal proof is that irregular verbs differ formally from regular verbs. But that
only proves that there must be some semantic difference between the two types of verb, it doesn't
tell us what that difference is.

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