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# Internal and external dynamics in language: Evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English

**Authors:** Christine F. Cuskley, Martina Pugliese, Claudio Castellano, Francesca Colaiori, Vittorio Loreto, Francesca Tria · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** PLoS ONE 9(8): e102882 (arXiv:1408.2699) **Link:** [arxiv.org/abs/1408.2699](https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2699) · **Licence:** arXiv non-exclusive licence — summary only

[**103** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W1978118493) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**2** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/cuskley-2014-internal-external-dynamics-language-evidence/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[arXiv:1408.2699 · PLoS ONE 9(8): e102882 (2014)](https://openalex.org/S202381698)[licence](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882)
- [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.2699)
- [DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0102882](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882)
- [arXiv 1408.2699](https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2699)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1978118493)

**Authors (6)**

1. [Christine F. Cuskley](https://openalex.org/A5014295856) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5699-4556) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3350791) · h 15 · 1102 citations · 51 works
2. [Martina Pugliese](https://openalex.org/A5044287987) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/48679678) · h 4 · 164 citations · 9 works
3. [Claudio Castellano](https://openalex.org/A5031236554) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3773-3801) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/48604593) · h 57 · 22978 citations · 372 works
4. [Francesca Colaiori](https://openalex.org/A5069264300) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7165-1941) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2138915) · h 24 · 2595 citations · 63 works
5. [Vittorio Loreto](https://openalex.org/A5070657345) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2506-2289) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144347993) · h 51 · 16215 citations · 290 works
6. [Francesca Tria](https://openalex.org/A5112075243) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8488-4066) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2583711) · h 24 · 1840 citations · 102 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Irregular verbs persist in English although rules are efficient. The paper looks at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English, from 1830 to 1989. For each verb and each decade it computes the share of irregular past tokens. It then sets equal token counts per decade, so that the period size does not bias the result. The total number of irregular types stays roughly constant, and irregular forms make up 65 to 70% of past tokens over the whole period. The growth of the regular class comes from new verbs entering the language (external pressure). Regularisation and irregularisation within the core vocabulary are about equal in size (internal dynamics), and they occur in a specific frequency window. The irregular verbs fall into 52 phonological classes, which the authors use to show that many irregulars follow minority rules.

## Ideas

- I1. Sampling: take the equal-tokens-per-decade design for Mova's historical test sets ([14. Sample texts, read word by word](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en-x-emode/14-sample-texts/), `tools/gutenberg`), so that one period does not dominate the measures.
- I2. `en/src/morph.rs`: a table of the 52 phonological classes for past-tense irregulars, with the most frequent irregular form as the class key, as the paper does. Measure the coverage of the irregular past forms on the lesson texts.
- I3. [14. Irregular verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/14-irregular-verbs/): list the irregular verbs by frequency band, and flag the verbs in the mid-frequency window, where the paper finds the changes happen. Those entries are the ones to check first.

## For Mova

The chapters are [14. Irregular verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/14-irregular-verbs/) and [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/). The code is `en/src/morph.rs` (past-tense inflection and the `morph::archaic` forms). Measure: the share of past forms the morphology gets right on a held-out verb list, run twice, with the classes built from the training part only.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0102882](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882) · [arXiv 1408.2699](https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2699)

```
@misc{cuskley2014internal,
  title = {{Internal and external dynamics in language: Evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English}},
  author = {Cuskley, Christine F. and Pugliese, Martina and Castellano, Claudio and Colaiori, Francesca and Loreto, Vittorio and Tria, Francesca},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0102882},
  eprint = {1408.2699},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882}
}
```

- [← previous Discourse Markers in Speech: Distinctive Features and Corpus Annotation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/crible-2017-discourse-markers-speech-distinctive-features/)
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- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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