Predictability and Paradigm Organization in Latin Verb Inflection

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to Latin verb inflection. As a starting point, it is necessary to provide some preliminary information on the verbal system, as it is outlined in traditional descriptions. We will do so in Sect. 4.1, where we will also review previous theoretically grounded studies on Latin inflectional morphology regarding verbs. We will then move to our analysis of implicative relations, which is performed not on the full paradigm of Latin verbs but on a reduced version that abstracts away from all cases of systematic syncretism, called the “cell paradigm” following Boyé and Schalchli (2016) (see Sect. 4.2 for a more detailed elaboration). Results on various fragments of the Latin paradigm will be presented in Sect. 4.3; in Sect. 4.3.1, we will focus on the alternation patterns that hold between wordforms that are based on different stems, and consequently on the uncertainty in predicting the cells involved from one another; in Sect. 4.3.2, we will look at the situation in wordforms that are based on the same stem. In Sect. 4.4, we will try to give an idea of the overall structure of the Latin verb paradigm, as it emerges from our entropy-based analysis. Firstly, we will draw a map of the paradigm in different zones that contain cells between which there is full mutual predictability. Secondly, we will compute entropy values on a so-called “distillation” (cf. Stump and Finkel 2013) of the paradigm, where we keep only one cell for each zone. Lastly, in Sect. 4.5 we will extend our investigation to predictions from more than one cell, whose uncertainty will be measured by means of n-ary implicative entropy. These results will also be exploited to extract principal part sets and near-principal part sets and compare them to the ones of the traditional analysis and to the ones that have been found with different methodologies—notably, Stump and Finkel (2013)’s Principal Part Analysis.