Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.

Last week I talked about how high-frequency words and phrases resist analogical change. This entrenchment happens because analogical change is driven by forgetting, and it’s harder to forget something that you’ve said a lot. In this post I want to talk about a different effect of frequency, the reduction effect, where high-frequency words and phrases get shortened and simplified.

I’m pleased that so many people found my last post on forgetting and language change interesting. Ariel Cohen-Goldberg in particular noted this about forgetting: @grvsmth Nice post! This correlates with the fact that many irregulars are high freq (went, have). Have to be HF not to get regularized! — Ariel Cohen-Goldberg (@arielmc_g) September 24, 2013 Cohen-Goldberg is absolutely right, and this stems from forgetting.