The emergence of structure in inflection: perfect roots in irregular Galician verbs

Abstract

Maiden (2001) identified the properties of coherence and convergence in the perfect stems of Galician, Portuguese and Spanish irregular verbs. Coherence is responsible for analogical levelling. Convergence is responsible for the tendency shown by the irregular perfect roots of different lexemes to share morphological similarities. In this paper, I will show that the form of irregular roots, and the properties of convergence and coherence, would be fanciful without the notions of lexical connection, lexical strength, relevance, or type and token frequency, proposed by the Exemplar Model of morphology. The changes undergone by roots also show how morphological structure is a property emerging from storage.