I am confused

[cema]

Pay - paid, not payed
Play - played, not plaid

Is that a rule or an exception? (This being English, may not be that different.)

Comments

[dumart.livejournal.com]

Let's pretend you create a (static) array of special cases. If the size of the array is big, you say this is a special rule. However, the size may be any integer number. Even for (size == 1) it may be considered a rule.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Technically, one could introduce a difference between a rule (code: something that can be executed) and an exception (data, such as an array or list of individual exceptions). In linguistics, my understanding is the situation is similar. Of course, if the rule only covers one or two cases, it is trivial and in practice not really different from an exception.