Word: irregularly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kids say the darnedest things. "We holded the baby rabbits." "The alligator goed kerplunk." "Horton heared a Who!" These lapses, you might dimly recall, have something to do with irregular verbs. But please don't stop reading just yet. Children's errors are not just anecdotes for grandparents or reminders of long-forgotten grammar lessons. They're windows into the workings of language, history and the human mind...
...when an irregular word is still fresh in the mind, it is fragile. If a child's memory cannot cough up held quickly enough, he or she adds -ed by default and says holded instead...
Addressing a standing-room only crowd, Pinker explained the origins of children's grammatical mistakes, the etymology of irregular verbs and why, for example, people say "slept" instead of "sleeped." His sprinkling of uncommon and incorrect forms of words throughout the talk, such as "smote," "clove" and "cleaved," elicited bursts of laughter from his audience...
...Language comes so easily to us, we tend to forget how complex it is," Pinker said. He analyzed in detail the reasons that irregular verbs exist and the differences between English and other languages in an attempt to explain the origins of the "vast expressive power of language...
While children use the rules of conjugation to create the correct forms of all regular verbs, he argued, they must memorize the forms of all irregular verbs. The most common irregular verbs, such as "be," "go" and "have," are never regularized because they are so common...