Irregularity in language: Saussure versus Chomsky versus Pinker

Abstract

Three areas of irregularity in English are considered: irregular or strong verbs, non-passivizable transitive verbs, and irregular noun plurals, through the eyes particularly of Steven Pinker and his book Words and rules (and The language instinct), but also as seen in Chomskyan generative 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 + consonant sequences (VCs) and consonant + vowel sequences (CVs) of the strong verbs of German and English.