Swahili verbs and the value of abstractive accounts for agglutinating inflection

Within “word-based”, “paradigm-based” or “abstractive” models of inflectional systems ( Blevins 2006 , 2016 ), only full inflected wordforms are considered primitives; subword strings treated not as distinct entities, but abstract generalisations inferred by speakers across multiple forms. These stand in contrast to “constructive” approaches, which proceed from individual, units words. An argument consistently adduced favour abstractive approaches is that they afford a descriptive advantage regarding “fusional” characterised pervasive non-canonical exponence, such cumulative extended and morphomic structure Stump : 17–30). Via an exploration phenomena including exponence arbitrary distributional regularities the verb inflection standard Swahili, language usually described exemplifying “agglutinating” amenable constructive, morpheme-based, analyses, this paper will argue equally applicable inflection, offering greater empirical plausibility some cases advantage.