 So I've looked at a lot of Steven's work again lately and I'd like to start with your early work on irregular verbs And it's striking to me how much in this work you think like an economist So some verbs are regular you conjugate them with an ed others are irregular right you don't say get it you say got Now how computationally efficient is that process? The I think it taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible I mean why why would I spend a good chunk of my career studying the minutiae of irregular verbs? I do love language. I love linguistic detail for its own sake But I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organization so why do we have a 165 or so quirky exceptions like Stride strode come came sing sang go went and so on which just seems there could be no rhyme or reason behind it I think it's just a consequence of the fact that we Memorize words and that's one of the two mechanisms behind language we Store by brute force wrote memory Arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning the word Duck doesn't look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck But I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because we and everyone in this room has memorized a Pairing between that sound and that meaning We don't just blur out words, but we also combine them into phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to Predict the or compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts in the way that they're arranged Those I are the two Mechanisms that make language possible But there are some kinds of meanings where they can compete over which system expresses a particular concept in the case of Regularity or a irregularity. We have two different ways of conveying the concept an action that took place in the past or in the case of plurals like mouse mice and rat rats two ways of talking about more than one thing we can memorize a more or less independent word to convey the idea like Struck or saying or we can apply an algorithm to say something in the past tense add ed to the end and then we get walk walked and because of the peculiarities of the history of a language you can have that labor divided between the rule system the algorithmic system and the memory system and it's the tension between those two systems that give rise to a Lot of the quirkiness of language including English irregular verbs So when you did this this was one of the first things to make you famous Did you know it in the back of your mind? This was a kind of Hayekian argument because it seems to me the common verbs that we use a lot those go irregular And it's easy to remember them because you use them all the time But the irregular verbs The regular verbs are ones that you don't use so often and thus again you're economizing on information in this decentralized way Yeah, I don't know how I don't know how well that analysis would work across a range of Zones of irregularity so in the it is certainly true that irregular verbs tend to be Common and which is kind of the bane of the language learner you you learn Spanish or French and all of the words that you use All the time you've got to memorize the conjugations But the and I think the reason for that is I might even Invoke Darwin more than than Hayek Namely that in the generation to generation transmission process of an irregular very regular group has to be memorized Because by definition there is no rule behind it The only way you know that the past tense of come is came is that you hear everyone else use came Since memory thrives on frequency the more often you hear something the better you remember it if any verb Declines in frequency and verbs become more or less fashionable for all kinds of reasons then you could have a generation that never Successfully masters it they'll default to the all-purpose ad-ed rule And then the verb will go from irregular to regular for that generation and all subsequent generations And so you've got a kind of an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the minds of children Memorizing them out where it's the less frequent ones that tend to fall out of the language So dreamt becomes dreamed for instance dream is prettier it is prettier and that's one of the Reasons that irregular verbs do stay in the language and one of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when when there there's a choice strided versus strode Strobe versus strived whole versus heaved is that they are they're good words they actually fit the Phonological template for a standard word in the language the kind of sound that you would use for a nickname or a Common word and they are more euphonious Because they aren't assembled in a kluji way from the verb stem and this this bit of detritus hanging on the end this ED or Or as the suffix which is serviceable. It allows you to convey a message, but it makes the The sound of the word itself a bit clunky, and then there are almost unpronounceable regular words like Sixths or edited where because you're sticking an extra bit on the end of a word. You're actually Messing up the nice contour of a standard word in the language And that's another one of the tensions that over the history course of the history of the language Will kind of shape the balance of regular and irregular forms. So that is Hayekian in the sense that No one planned the language to be optimal in satisfying one criterion. There are trade-offs. There are multiple tugs pushes and pulls and In a as speakers millions of speakers make little adjustments as they use the language as kids learn the language the language itself spontaneously evolves with some balance