The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation

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.