(*)ABA in Germanic verbs

What it is about

An ABA pattern is a paradigm in which the first and third cells share a stem and the middle one differs. Bobaljik's constraint *ABA says such patterns are impossible, and it has been applied to the Germanic verb with the cells ordered present, past participle, preterite, so that ABA means a present and preterite that share a stem against a different participle. The paper gives counter-examples: the Swedish verb "ha" ("have"), where the present and preterite stem is /hɑː/ and the participle /haf/; the Low German "nehmen" (take); and the Gammalsvenskby "sleep" verb. It argues against a universal constraint and proposes a diachronic account instead: none of the seven Proto-Germanic strong verb classes shows ABA, so modern ABA verbs are rare, and class 4 is the most likely source of new ones. Frequency asymmetries between modern vowel patterns are offered as independent support. The paper gives examples and an argument, not corpus counts.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/morph.rs: an audit of the English irregular list (14. Irregular verbs) for lemmas whose present and simple past share a stem while the participle differs (beat, beat, beaten is one). Expect very few; report the count and the list, and keep the test in the lexicon checks.
• I2. Store a Proto-Germanic class (1 to 7) as a Rust enum on each English strong verb and use it in en/src/morph.rs to predict the form of an unseen irregular from its nearest class member. Measure on held-out irregulars, with a control that picks the class at random.
• I3. The paper's frequency claim (high-frequency irregulars survive, low-frequency ones become regular) gives a deterministic rule for the predicted past of rare irregulars. Check it on an open frequency list; the rule must beat "always -ed" on held-out verbs.

For Mova

The English chapter is 14. Irregular verbs, with the inflection code in en/src/morph.rs. The paper's examples for English (swell, shear) are cases where the preterite has regularised and the participle stayed strong, which is relevant to the class rule. The main measure is accuracy on held-out irregular verbs, with the random-class control. The German and Swedish data are not for English.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.733

@article{andersson2018aba,
  title = {{()ABA in Germanic verbs}},
  author = {Andersson, Samuel},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.733},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.733}
}

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56. How to cite this article: Andersson, Samuel. 2018. (*)ABA in Germanic verbs. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 119. 1–20, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.733 ↗ our card
57. Published: 20 November 2018 find
58. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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