VeLePa: Central Pame verbal inflection in a quantitative perspective

Abstract

This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification system where prefixes, stems, tone-stress, and suffixes all display inflection classes and irregularities which are only partially predictable from each other. A quantitative analysis of morphological predictability as per the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem is conducted for every layer, and for the whole word, as well as of the uncertainties language users face to learn or predict the morphosyntactic values or lexical meaning of a verb form from its morphology.