Cover not available
Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 18:2 (2023) ► pp.177–217

Behavioural evidence for implicative paradigmatic relations

ORCID logo | The Ohio State University
ORCID logo | Université Paris Cité

Form predictability has long been known to influence speaker behaviour in language learning and use. However, this observation has largely remained dissociated from the question of the most apt theoretical framing of the effects observed. We set out to seek evidence that speakers’ relationship to form predictability is best characterised in paradigmatic terms: in an experimental task comparable to prediction of one word form from a related one, speakers appear sensitive to the probabilistic, implicative relations that make up a morphological paradigm. We find this effect to be omnidirectional, from any paradigm cell to any paradigm cell. Form predictability does not impact speaker behaviour in a vacuum, but instead works together with aspects of memory and learning to organise the mental lexicon and inform language use. In a corpus study, we map out the complex relationships that exist between paradigmatic form predictability, lexeme frequency and cell frequency in the context of naturalistic language use. Speakers appear to exploit all available probabilistic relationships between the word forms of a language in a way that is predicted by Word and Paradigm theories of morphology, with memory and predictive processing playing a mediating role in all aspects of language use.

Keywords: word-and-paradigm morphology, frequency, predictability, irregularity, corpus study, acceptability judgement experiment, memory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The implicative structure of paradigms
    • 2.2Quantitatively tackling the PCFP
    • 2.3Zipfian frequency distributions, discriminability and the PCFP
    • 2.4Shifting the perspective: Form predictability as a paradigmatic phenomenon
    • 2.5Predictions and outline
  • 3.Acceptability judgement experiment
    • 3.1Items
    • 3.2Procedure
    • 3.3Subjects
    • 3.4Analysis
      • Paradigmatic predictability
      • Condition
      • Paradigmatic predictability: Condition
      • Phonological Well-formedness
    • 3.5Results
    • 3.6Discussion
  • 4.Corpus Study
    • 4.1Methodology
      • 4.1.1Data selection
      • 4.1.2Model structure
        • Predicted variable
          • Token frequency
        • Predictor Variables
          • Paradigmatic predictability
          • Co-paradigmatic frequency
          • Cell frequency
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.22020.cop
References
Ackerman, F., Blevins, J. P., & Malouf, R.
(2009) Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. (Cit. on pp. 3, 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ackerman, F., & Malouf, R.
(2013) Morphological organization: the low conditional entropy conjecture. Language, 89 1, 429–464 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Albright, A.C.
(2003) A Quantitative Study of Spanish Paradigm Gaps. WCCFL 22: Proceedings of the 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (cit. on pp. 7, 20, 26).Google Scholar
Albright, A. C.
(2002) The Identification of Bases in Morphological Paradigms (Doctoral dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles. (Cit. on pp. 2, 8, 11, 24, 26).
Albright, A. C., & Hayes, B. P.
(2003) Rules vs. Analogy in English Past Tenses: A Computational/Experimental Study. Cognition, 90 1, 119–161 (cit. on pp. 3, 6, 26). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arnon, I., & Snider, N.
(2010) More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62 1, 67–82 (cit. on p. 11). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M.
(1994) Morphology by itself. MIT Press. (Cit. on p. 3).Google Scholar
Baayen, R.H.
(2011) Corpus linguistics and naive discriminative learning. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, 11 1, 295–328 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Chuang, Y.-Y., Shafaei-Bajestan, E., & Blevins, J. P.
(2019) The discriminative lexicon: A unified computational model for the lexicon and lexical processing in comprehension and production grounded not in (de) composition but in linear discriminative learning. Complexity, 2019 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Feldman, L. B., & Schreuder, R.
(2006) Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 55 (2), 290–313 (cit. on p. 28). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R.H., Hendrix, P., & Ramscar, M.
(2013) Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: an explanation of n-gram frequency effects based on naive discriminative learning. Language and Speech, 56 (Pt 3), 329–47 (cit. on p. 11). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L., Lieber, R., & Plag, I.
(2013) Oxford Reference Guide to English morphology. Oxford University Press. (Cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beniamine, S.
(2018) Typologie quantitative des systèmes de classes flexionnelles (Doctoral dissertation). Université Paris Diderot. (Cit. on pp. 7, 13).
(2021) One lexeme, many classes: Inflection class systems as lattices. In B. Crysmann & M. Sailer (Eds.), One-to-many relations in morphology, syntax and semantics (pp. 23–51). Language Science Press. (Cit. on p. 28).Google Scholar
Beniamine, S., Bonami, O., & Luís, A. R.
(2021) The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation. Isogloss, 7 (1–35) (cit. on pp. 7, 9). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beniamine, S., Coavoux, M., & Bonami, O.
(2022) French verbal frequencies in the Open Subtitles corpus [ ]. (Cit. on p. 24). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berko Gleason, J.
(1958) The Child’s Learning of English Morphology. Word, 14 1 (cit. on pp. 3, 8).Google Scholar
Blevins, J. P., Milin, P., & Ramscar, M.
(2017) The Zipfian Paradigm Cell Filling Problem. Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory (cit. on p. 21). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P.
(2016) Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford University Press. (Cit. on pp. 3, 4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonami, O., & Beniamine, S.
(2016) Joint predictiveness in inflectional paradigms. Word Structure, 9 (2), 156–182 (cit. on pp. 7, 12). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonami, O., & Boyé, G.
(2014) De formes en thèmes. In F. Villoing, S. Leroy, & S. David (Eds.), Foisonnements morphologiques. Etudes en hommage à Françoise Kerleroux (pp. 17–45). Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest. (Cit. on pp. 11, 12).Google Scholar
Bonami, O., Caron, G., & Plancq, C.
(2014) Construction d’un lexique flexionnel phonétisé libre du français. Quatrième Congrès mondial de linguistique française (cit. on pp. 13, 14, 22). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonami, O., & Strnadová, J.
(2019) Paradigm structure and predictability in derivational morphology. Morphology, 29 1 (cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boye, G., & Schalchli, G.
(2016) The status of paradigms. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology (pp. 206–234). Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brooks, M. E., Kristensen, K., van Benthem, K. J., Magnusson, A., Berg, C. W., Nielsen, A., Skaug, H. J., Maechler, M., & Bolker, B. M.
(2017) glmmTMB balances speed and flexibility among packages for zero-inflated generalized linear mixed modeling. The R Journal, 9 (2), 378–400. [URL] (cit. on pp. 14, 23) DOI logo
(1985) Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form (cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1965) Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. (Cit. on p. 3).Google Scholar
del Prado Martín, F. M., Kostić, A., & Baayen, H. R.
(2004) Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition, 94 (1), 1–18 (cit. on pp. 26, 28, 29). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Marneffe, M.-C., Manning, C. D., Nivre, J., & Zeman, D.
(2021) Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics, 47 (2), 255–308 (cit. on p. 24). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Filipović Durđević, D., & Milin, P.
(2019) Information and learning in processing adjective inflection [Structure in words: the present and future of morphologicalical processing in a multidisciplinary perspective]. Cortex, 116 1, 209–227 (cit. on p. 8).Google Scholar
Frank, S. L., Otten, L. J., Galli, G., & Vigliocco, G.
(2015) The ERP response to the amount of information conveyed by words in sentences. Brain and Language, 140 1, 1–11 (cit. on p. 18). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guzmán Naranjo, M.
(2020) Analogy, complexity and predictability in the Russian nominal inflection system. Morphology, 30 (3), 219–262 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, M., & Sims, A. D.
(2010) Understanding Morphology. Arnold. (Cit. on pp. 20, 25).Google Scholar
Hathout, N., Sajous, F., & Calderone, B.
(2014) GLÀFF, a large versatile French lexicon. Proceedings of LREC 2014 (cit. on p. 22).Google Scholar
Hockett, C. F.
(1967) The Yawelmani basic verb. Language, 43 1, 208–222 (cit. on p. 4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K.
(2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jun, J., & Albright, A.
(2016) Speakers’ Knowledge of Alternations Is Asymmetrical: Evidence from Seoul Korean Verb Paradigms. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on pp. 9–11, 17, 19, 30).Google Scholar
Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M.
(2010) Wuggy: A multilingual pseudoword generator. Behavior research methods, 42 1, 627–33 (cit. on p. 13). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiefer, F.
(2000) Regularity. In Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung/Morphology: An international Handbook on Inflection and Word-Formation. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. (Cit. on pp. 20, 25). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A.
(1984) Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature, 307 1, 161–163 (cit. on p. 18). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Le, H., Vial, L., Frej, J., Segonne, V., Coavoux, M., Lecouteux, B., Allauzen, A., Crabbé, B., Besacier, L., & Schwab, D.
(2020) FlauBERT: Unsupervised language model pre-training for French. Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2479–2490. [URL] (cit. on p. 24)
Lévèque, D., & Pellard, T.
(2023) The implicative structure of Asama verb paradigms. Morphology, 33 1 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, E., Michel, J.-B., Jackson, J., Tang, T., & Nowak, M. A.
(2007) Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language. Nature, 449 (7163), 713–716 (cit. on pp. 7, 20). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lison, P., & Tiedemann, J.
(2016) OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting large parallel corpora from movie and TV subtitles. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), 923–929. [URL] (cit. on p. 24)
Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., & Baayen, H.
(2018) Whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size facilitate Estonian case-inflected noun processing. Cognition, 175 1, 20–25 (cit. on pp. 10, 28). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., Tomaschek, F., Tucker, B., & Baayen, H.
(2018) Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects. Morphology, 28 1 (cit. on pp. 10, 28). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lukatela, G., Gligorijević, B., Kostić, A., & Turvey, M. T.
(1980) Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon. Memory & Cognition, 8 1, 415–423 (cit. on p. 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maiden, M.
(1995) A Linguistic History of Italian. Longman. [URL]. (Cit. on p. 20)
Malouf, R.
(2017) Abstractive morphological learning with a recurrent neural network. Morphology, 27 1, 431–458 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mansfield, J.
(2016) Intersecting formatives and inflectional predictability: How do speakers and learners predict the correct form of Murrinhpatha verbs? Word Structure, 9 1, 183–214 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F.
(2001) The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. The MIT Press. (Cit. on p. 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., Xu, F., & Clahsen, H.
(1992) Overregularization in Language Acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57 (4), i–178. Retrieved September 23, 2022, from [URL] (cit. on p. 21) DOI logo
Marzi, C., Ferro, M., & Pirrelli, V.
(2019) A Processing-Oriented Investigation of Inflectional Complexity. Frontiers in Communication, 4 1 (cit. on p. 21). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matthews, P. H.
(1965) The inflectional component of a word-and-paradigm grammar. Journal of Linguistics, 1 1, 139–171 (cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1972) Inflectional Morphology. A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on p. 4).Google Scholar
(1991) Morphology (2nd). Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milin, P., & Blevins, J. P.
(2020) Paradigms in morphology. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. (Cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milin, P., Kuperman, V., Kostic, A., & Baayen, H.
(2009) Paradigms bit by bit: An information theoretic approach to the processing of paradigmatic structure in inflection and derivation (cit. on pp. 10, 28). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Kostić, A., & Baayen, R. H.
(2004) Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition, 94 1, 1–18 (cit. on p. 10). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pellegrini, M.
(2021) Patterns of interpredictability and principal parts in Latin verb paradigms: An entropy-based approach. Journal of Latin Linguistics, 20 (1) (cit. on p. 7).Google Scholar
Pinker, S.
(1999) Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language. Basic Books. [URL]. (Cit. on p. 21)
Pinker, S., & Prince, A.
(1988) On language and connectionism: Analysis ofa parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28 (1), 73193 (cit. on p. 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prasada, S., & Pinker, S.
(1993) Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8 1, 1–56 (cit. on p. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramscar, M.
(2021) A discriminative account of the learning, representation and processing of inflection systems. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience (cit. on p. 7).Google Scholar
Rayner, K., Ashby, J., Pollatsek, A., & Reichle, E.
(2004) The Effects of Frequency and Predictability on Eye Fixations in Reading: Implications for the E-Z Reader Model. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 30 1, 720–32 (cit. on p. 18). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robins, R. H.
(1959) In defense of WP. Transactions of the Philological Society, 58 1, 116–144 (cit. on p. 4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L.
(1986) On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs. In Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 2: Psychological and Biological Models (pp. 216–271). MIT Press. (Cit. on pp. 7, 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schafer, R.
(2015) Processing and Querying Large Web Corpora with the COW14 architecture. Proceedings of Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora, 28–34 (cit. on pp. 23, 24).Google Scholar
Seyfarth, S., Ackerman, F., & Malouf, R.
(2014) Implicative organization facilitates morphological learning. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 480–494 (cit. on p. 9). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sims, A. D.
(2015) Inflectional defectiveness. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on pp. 7, 20). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sims, A. D., & Parker, J.
(2016) How inflection class systems work: On the informativity of implicative structure. Word Structure, 9 1, 215–239 (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, N. J., & Levy, R.
(2011) Cloze but no cigar: The complex relationship between cloze, corpus, and subjective probabilities in language processing. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 33 1 (cit. on p. 18).Google Scholar
(2013) The effect of word predictability on reading time is logarithmic. Cognition, 128 (3), 302–319 (cit. on p. 18). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Štekauer, P.
(2014) Derivational Paradigms. In R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (pp. 354–369). Oxford University Press. (Cit. on p. 3).Google Scholar
Stump, G. T.
(2001) Inflectional Morphology. A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stump, G. T., & Finkel, R.
(2013) Morphological Typology: From Word to Paradigm. Cambridge University Press. (Cit. on pp. 3, 9). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thymé, A., Ackerman, F., & Elman, J.
(1994) Finnish Nominal Inflection: Paradigmatic Patterns and Token Analogy. In S. D. Lima, R. Corrigan, & G. K. Iverson (Eds.), The Reality of Linguistic Rules. John Benjamins. (Cit. on pp. 7, 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M.
(2001) A neurocognitive perspective on language: The declarative/procedural model. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2 1, 717–26 (cit. on p. 8). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilmoth, S., & Mansfield, J.
(2021) Inflectional predictability and prosodic morphology in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Morphology (cit. on p. 7). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, S., Cotterell, R., & O’Donnell, T. J.
(2019) Morphological Irregularity Correlates with Frequency. CoRR, abs/1906.11483. [URL] (cit. on pp. 7, 11, 21, 22, 25) DOI logo
Wunderlich, D., & Fabri, R.
(1995) Minimalist Morphology: An approach to inflection. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 14 (2), 236–294 (cit. onp. 3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wurzel, W. U.
(1984) Flexionsmorphologie und NatÃŒdichkeit: Ein beitrag zur mor-phologischen theoriebildung. Akademie Verlag. (Cit. on p. 4).Google Scholar
(1989) Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness (cit. on p. 4).Google Scholar
Yang, C.
(2016) The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of LanguageHow Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language. (Cit. on p. 21).Google Scholar
Zehr, J., & Schwarz, F.
(2018) PennController for Internet Based Experiments (cit. on p. 14).Google Scholar