Abstract Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most frequent usage conflates or replaces other notions such as type frequency, productivity, (non-)concatenative morphology, storage vs. computation, predictability, etc. An assessment of these and other variables in Icelandic verbal inflection reveals that most of them are in practice strongly correlated. I conclude, however, that this is largely unsurprising by virtue of the definitional dependencies holding between those notions. It is empirically doubtful whether there exists a single underlying phenomenon or category which the terms designate. In addition, given their multiple and overlapping senses, and the existence of separate, unambiguous labels for the relevant underlying notions, I contend that the terms ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ should be ideally abandoned in scientific literature in order to avoid ambiguity, sloppy reasoning and misunderstandings and to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison and interdisciplinary dialogue.

中文翻译：

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解构（非）规律性

摘要 规则性和不规则性是语言学中被广泛引用的概念。这些术语得到了悠久而古老的传统的支持，然而（或者可能因此）不同的学科和作者似乎以非常不同的方式将它们用于非常不同的现象。最频繁的用法混淆或取代了其他概念，如类型频率、生产力、（非）连接形态、存储与计算、可预测性等。 对冰岛语语言变化中的这些和其他变量的评估表明，它们中的大多数都在实践强相关。然而，我得出的结论是，由于这些概念之间的定义依赖关系，这在很大程度上并不令人惊讶。从经验上来说，是否存在这些术语所指定的单一潜在现象或类别是值得怀疑的。