Verb regularization

Verb regularization is a form of language change in which an exceptional verb form is replaced by one following a productive grammatical pattern. For English past forms, this can mean adopting the -ed pattern rather than retaining an inherited alternative. Historical change in a speech community is distinct from a child's occasional application of a pattern to an irregular verb.

A quantitative study by Erez Lieberman and collaborators tracked irregular verbs across historical stages and identified help among verbs that became regular.^[ref] A hypothetical series with regular forms in 12 of 40 past-tense uses at one stage and 32 of 40 at another would show the regular variant's proportion rising from $0.3$ to $0.8$. Those counts alone would not establish the cause: recording practices, speaker composition and competing variants must also be checked. Regularization describes a pattern of inflection, not a judgment that the newer form is intrinsically better.