Explaining uncertainty and defectivity of inflectional paradigms

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.

Uncertainty in the production of Czech noun and verb forms

“…However, our previous research (see Nikolaev & Bermel, 2022) suggests that uncertainty is a way of looking at non-canonical material as part of a gradient category. At the beginning of this article, we said that multiple plausible stems were a frequent cause of either D or OA cells, and we sought to ascertain how respondents treated them.…”

“…Gender was entered as a variable in the analyses but was not significant in any of them. In a recent study (Nikolaev & Bermel, 2022), an initial sample was also skewed towards women. We subsequently recruited more men to achieve a roughly 50:50 balance.…”

“…In Nikolaev & Bermel (2022) we operationalized uncertainty both as a collective phenomenon (for a cohort of speakers) and as an individual phenomenon (for each given speaker) and applied this to evaluate the possibility that cells in a Finnish verbal paradigm with multiple stems are either defective or non-defective. We found that respondents could adequately evaluate uncertainty using several metrics (perceived frequency, contemporaneousness, and acceptability), and that the frequency of both the lemma and the specific form in question played a central role in their evaluations.…”

A contrastive approach to grammatical doubts in some contemporary Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Swedish)

“…Hudson 2000). On the other hand, overabundance can be a result of defectivity, when a gap is filled with an expected, synonymous, periphrastic, or novel word form by language users, as a consequence of (collective) uncertainty (for the competition between these routes and the associated inhibition effects see Nikolaev & Bermel 2022).…”

Studying negative evidence in Finnish language corpora

“…This does not mean that Finnish speakers do not know how to get better; most of them just do not know how to express it using the infinitive form of the verb, due to the gap in this inflectional paradigm. Nikolaev and Bermel (2022) take a hybrid view on defectivity. The authors do not restrict defectivity only to those word forms that are mentioned in handbooks as defective, nor do they claim that all paradigms are defective.…”