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Semantics drives analogical change in Germanic strong verb paradigms: a phylogenetic study

What it is about

The study codes 107 Germanic strong verbs across 14 languages, from Old English and Gothic to modern Icelandic and Swedish, by the vowel pattern of three principal parts (AAA, AAB, ABA, ABB, ABC). Each language is marked for whether the present perfect is extended to narrative past (E) or not (N); English is N, German is E. A hierarchical continuous-time Markov model is fitted on 50 phylogenetic trees. The main result is a decisive difference for the ABB pattern: its long-run preference is higher under E (95% interval of the difference from 0.203 to 0.435), and the ABB exit rate is lower under E (from -18.63 to -1.257). Entry rates do not differ. The authors read this as retention of a pattern in a context where it marks a binary contrast, not as attraction to it.

Ideas

For Mova

English is the N-regime language in this study (the paper's own example of a non-extended perfect), so the English verbs can be checked against the retention claim: the paper's prediction is that ABB verbs persist mainly where the pattern marks the contrast, and English is the case where that contrast is weaker. The English code is en/src/morph.rs and the English chapter is 14. Irregular verbs. The paper's method (phylogenetic models) is out of reach for Mova's rule system, but the exit-rate idea and the shuffled control are easy to reproduce.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 2502.17670

@misc{craevschi2025semantics,
  title = {{Semantics drives analogical change in Germanic strong verb paradigms: a phylogenetic study}},
  author = {Craevschi, Alexandru and Babinski, Sarah and Cathcart, Chundra},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2502.17670},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17670}
}

References

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