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 strategies dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and these are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, other lexical structural characteristics words. administered verb production (inflection) task Finnish using verbs from small non-productive type has many asked participants inflect the given context. Inflectional was measured number different produced for each verb. classified were not expected as either synonymous or novel optimal string alignment distance forms. Our analyses revealed usage-based approach fits better obtained results than classical typically met dictionaries descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, can be described dynamic rather static system, where represent continuum possible choices lack an variant.