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.

Emily Brewster remarked the other day on the emergence and resurgence of irregular verb forms like “snuck,” “dreamt” and “awoke.” Stan Carey calls these forms unusual, and they are less common than innovative regular forms, but they are not surprising if you know the mechanisms underlying morphological change, in particular the role of forgetting and how we use analogy to overcome it. For years, many linguists assumed that all change happened

Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.” In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching.

I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation, the Spread of Change in French Negation . That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting. You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for.