I have noticed recently that I seem to have a tendency to accidentally regularize many irregular verbs a lot more often then other people do. I'll say "flied", "choosed", "catched" "throwed", "teached", "freezed" "sweeped", "costed", "beated" , hurted, shutted, etc.
Though it was very odd.
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This post blew me away.
ReplyDeleteI'm a language teacher, Taylor. I teach English and write text books for people who speak other languages so I'm very interested in how we learn languages.
We don't know how people learn grammar. We try to help the process as best we can and there are lots of pointers in the research to help us about things that seem to help speed up the process. But nobody who knows much about the process claims to know how it really happens. It’s a mystery.
There's one theory that I find attractively plausible. A guy called Nattinger posited that we learn chunks - common phrases - holistically and then induct the rules. And something that seems to support it is a curious phenomena that’s often observed with kids learning to speak, where they learn past tense phrases like “We went to the shops”. And then later, as their speech develops they start over-generalising and saying things like “I goed to the shops”. And then later, after more exposure, they revert back to “I went to the shops.”
So I was fascinated when I read this post. It seems you might be taking a "scientific" approach, as you have described in other postings - tidying up the irregularities.
To me, language seems very messy. When I try to tidy it up and teach it in tidy blocks, it's hard to organise. But on another level it does work - somehow the human race gets by on it.
Please keep writing these great posts. You are an inspiration.