Abstract
Recent literature has highlighted the extent to which inflectional paradigms are organisedinto systems of implications allowing speakers to make full use of the inflection systemon the basis of exposure to only a few forms of each word. The present paper contributesto this line of research by investigating in detail the implicative structure of EuropeanPortuguese verbal paradigms. After outlining the computational methods we use to thateffect, we deploy these methods on a lexicon of about 5000 verbs, and show how the morphological and phonological properties of European Portuguese verbs lead to the observed patterns of predictability.
Highlights
In the last fifteen years, the study of predictability relations in inflectional paradigms has become one of the central issues in theoretical morphology
Ackerman and Malouf (2013) argued that the study of implicative structure is of high theoretical importance: the im plicative organization of paradigms reveal an aspect of morphological complexity that is orthogonal to “enumerative” indicators such as Greenberg’s (1954) indices of synthesis and agglutination: while languages vary widely in the amount of information that is con veyed by inflected words and how it is conveyed, the inflectional strategies are organized in such a fashion that the forms filling a paradigm are not too hard to predict from one another
This will be the approach of the following section: starting from a macroscopic view of the paradigms of European Portuguese induced by the examination of the distribution of conditional entropy values, we will examine in more detail specific implicative relations between pairs of cells and determine which properties of the system lead to a high or low predictability
Summary
In the last fifteen years, the study of predictability relations in inflectional paradigms has become one of the central issues in theoretical morphology. We provide an in depth exploration of the morphological and morphophonological sources of unpredictability in European Por tuguese verbal paradigms: using computationally identified predictability values as our guideposts, we identify which properties of the system lead to such values. In this area we improve dramatically on Bonami and Luıs (2014) by relying on a much larger lexicon and properly taking into account stressconditioned vowel alternations.
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