Nikolaev, A. and Bermel, N. orcid.org/0000-0002-1663-9322 (2022) Explaining uncertainty and defectivity of inflectional paradigms. Cognitive Linguistics, 33 (3). pp. 585-621. ISSN 0936-5907
Abstract
The current study investigates how native speakers of a morphologically complex language (Finnish) handle uncertainty related to linguistic forms that have gaps in their inflectional paradigms. We analyze their strategies of dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and how these strategies are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, and other lexical and structural characteristics of words. We administered a verb production (inflection) task with Finnish native speakers using verbs from a small non-productive inflectional type that has many paradigmatic gaps and asked participants to inflect the verbs in a given context. Inflectional uncertainty was measured by the number of different forms the participants produced for each verb. We classified produced forms that were not expected as either synonymous or novel and measured their optimal string alignment distance to expected forms. Our analyses revealed that a usage-based approach to paradigmatic defectivity fits better with the obtained results than a classical approach typically met in dictionaries and descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, that paradigmatic defectivity can be better described as a dynamic rather than a static system, where gaps represent a continuum of possible inflectional choices rather than a lack of an inflectional variant.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) |
Keywords: | inflectional morphology; network analysis; overabundance; paradigmatic defectivity; usage-based approach |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Languages and Cultures (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL AH/T002859/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Aug 2022 09:46 |
Last Modified: | 03 Feb 2023 10:18 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Walter de Gruyter GmbH |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1515/cog-2021-0041 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:189947 |