Abstract
To investigate the relationship between morphological irregularity & word frequency, plural nouns in the one-million-word Uppsala corpus of Russian are categorized for three types of frequency anomalies & seven degrees of irregularity. For each degree of irregularity, probability values are calculated for the absolute frequency of plural forms, their relative frequency compared to singular forms of the same lexeme, & the frequencies of paradigmatic case cells relative to those of the same cells throughout the corpus. Results strongly confirm a hypothesis that absolute plural anomaly correlates with irregularity; ie, nouns with irregular plural subparadigms tend to occur frequently in the plural. Relative plural anomaly was found to correlate significantly with segmental irregularity only, not stress irregularity; no relationship was found between irregularity & cell frequency. 7 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 27 References. J. Hitchcock