One example of such a process is subregular patterns getting extended instead of always levelling toward the most productive constructions.
In many southern dialects, for example, even though the productive past tense is the “-ed” past (just like it is in all modern varieties of English), and so we normally would expect to get regularization like “cleave/clove/cloven” > “cleave/cleaved/cleaved”, we instead in these dialects get irregular examples like “bring/brought/brought” being regularized not to expected productive “bring/bringed/bringed”, but rather “bring/brang/brung” on the pattern of “sing/sang/sung”, “drink/drank/drunk”, etc.
Extending subregularities like this can cause irregular patterns to persist and grow stronger over time.
I suppose that technically this isn’t introducing a new irregularity so much as it is helping an older one persist, but it’s a similar process.
Other recent innovations include things like Canadian and northern US English “I’m done my homework”, northern positive anymore (“Anymore, I go to the store on Fridays”), and prepositional “because” (“I can’t come tonight, because homework”).
Again, this isn’t exactly the development of new irregular morphology specifically, but these are analogous processes elsewhere in the grammar.
It’s also worth mentioning that English is becoming more and more of an isolating language over time (a language with less morphology), and so we’d actually expect irregular morphology specifically to become less common in these systems.
hakase@lemm.ee 1 month ago
One example of such a process is subregular patterns getting extended instead of always levelling toward the most productive constructions.
In many southern dialects, for example, even though the productive past tense is the “-ed” past (just like it is in all modern varieties of English), and so we normally would expect to get regularization like “cleave/clove/cloven” > “cleave/cleaved/cleaved”, we instead in these dialects get irregular examples like “bring/brought/brought” being regularized not to expected productive “bring/bringed/bringed”, but rather “bring/brang/brung” on the pattern of “sing/sang/sung”, “drink/drank/drunk”, etc.
Extending subregularities like this can cause irregular patterns to persist and grow stronger over time.
I suppose that technically this isn’t introducing a new irregularity so much as it is helping an older one persist, but it’s a similar process.
Other recent innovations include things like Canadian and northern US English “I’m done my homework”, northern positive anymore (“Anymore, I go to the store on Fridays”), and prepositional “because” (“I can’t come tonight, because homework”).
Again, this isn’t exactly the development of new irregular morphology specifically, but these are analogous processes elsewhere in the grammar.
It’s also worth mentioning that English is becoming more and more of an isolating language over time (a language with less morphology), and so we’d actually expect irregular morphology specifically to become less common in these systems.