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Copyright of Linguistics Vanguard is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Etudes Romanes de Brno is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates whether forms associated with verbal inflection can be acquired in relation to two UG-based L2 acquisition hypotheses: the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) Hypothesis (Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 1994. Word order and nominative case in nonnative language acquisition: A longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage. In Teun Hoekstra & Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), Language acquisition Studies in generative grammar, 317–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the 'full transfer/full access' model. Second Language Research 12. 40–72) and the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli, Ianthi-maria & Maria Dimitrakopoulou. 2007. The Interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23. 215–242). The former captures the insight that convergence on grammars like those of native speakers is possible, whereas the latter argues that a native/non-native divergence results from the inaccessibility of some uninterpretable syntactic features. Ninety adult L1 speakers of Chinese of different English proficiency levels were asked to interpret and produce tense and agreement in various contexts in three tasks. Results suggest that the underlying grammatical representations in the end-state grammar may not be the same as native speakers'. We speculate that the inaccessibility of the uninterpretable [uInfl:] feature of v and the uninterpretable [uInfl:*] feature of be are the potential source of difficulty in acquiring verbal inflection in L2 English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrenchment and schematisation are the two most important cognitive processes in language acquisition. In this article, the role of the two processes, operationalised by token and type frequency, in the production of overgeneralised verb forms in Croatian preschool children is investigated using a parental questionnaire and computational simulation of language acquisition. The participants of the questionnaire were parents of children aged 3;0–5;11 years (n = 174). The results showed that parents of most children (93 %) reported the parallel use of both adult-like and overgeneralised verb forms, suggesting that Croatian-speaking preschool children have not yet fully acquired the verbal system. The likelihood of overgeneralised forms being reported decreases with the age of the children and verb type frequency. The results of the computational simulation show that patterns with a higher type frequency also show a greater preference for the correct form, while lexical items show both learning and unlearning tendencies during the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive account of the paradigms of Frisian verb-classes. Verb-classes in Frisian are an example of a more general phenomenon of inflectional classes that we encounter in many natural languages across the major word classes. Members of different inflectional classes show different paradigms. Traditionally, inflectional classes have been analyzed using class-features (see e.g., Marzi et al. 2020). However, such features suffer from being ad hoc devices that seem to have no other function in the grammar than to code this difference. In the present analysis we propose that the verb stems from different classes show a difference in size. Using phrasal spell-out, we will show that these stems differ in the amount of morpho-syntactic structure that they may realize, rendering class-features superfluous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most important and also the most challenging processes in morphology field, inflection has been under scrutiny from different points of view. Construction Morphology (CM) as one of the subsequent approaches in morphology with a structural perspective attempts to establish a systematic relationship between form and meaning and in this regard it introduces a means to analyze miscellaneous morphological processes, including inflection. The present study depicts the inflectional forms of verb in Sanandaji dialect of Kurdish in the Construction Morphology framework based on data taken from 1000 sentences, including 100 simple Sanandaji Kurdish verbs compiled by authors. What this paper copes with is the inflectional constructions analysis of simple verb in Kurdish using the constructional schemas. As a result, it is indicated in some cases by which there is no common basis between present and past stem of the verb, second-order schemas are capable of establishing such relationship properly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a first description of verbal number in Idi, a language of the Pahoturi River family spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Idi shows an intricate system of marking verbal number, evident in verb stems and two sets of suffixes occurring in different positions on the verb, based on a distinction between nonplural (1 or 2) versus plural (more than 2). Verbs also agree in person and number with core arguments; this system of nominal number is distinguishing singular (1) from nonsingular (more than 1). Elements from the two systems are combined to arrive at composite number values for both events and participants. In addition, verbal number interrelates with a lexical aspectual distinction of punctual/telic versus durative/atelic, manifesting on verb stems and in inflectional patterns. The paper provides evidence for the thesis that verbal number in Idi is not merely lexically determined, but largely inflectional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses verbal stem allomorphy in Romance within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). We will present several technical instruments provided by the framework, applying them to an analysis of Romance verbal forms, with a particular focus on stem suppletion with the verb go. We conclude that the best solution to the problem of form–function discrepancies, as they appear in suppletion (but not only), is a spanning approach. This approach operates at Vocabulary Insertion only, without any need for the assumption of further, often critically discussed, morphological processes, such as fusion or pruning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Estonian & Finno-Ugric Linguistics / Eesti ja Soome-ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri is the property of University of Tartu Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mental time travel and language enable us to go back and forth in time and to organize and express our personal experiences through time reference. People with Alzheimer's disease have both mental time travel and time reference impairments, which can greatly impact their daily communication. Currently, little is known about the potential relationship between time conceptualization (i.e., mental time travel) and time reference difficulties in this disease. A systematic review of the literature was performed to determine if this link had already been investigated. Only three articles integrated both time conceptualization and time reference measures. However, the link between the two was not systematically analyzed and interpreted. This review highlights the lack of research addressing the question of the influence of time conceptualization impairments in Alzheimer's disease on other cognitive domains, and especially language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of students with the experience of migration has been growing year by year in Polish schools. They need to learn Polish relatively fast for educational purposes. This paper presents, based on a pilot glottodidactic experiment, the observations of how foreign children could be helped to learn Polish using simple math exercises. The demonstrated outline of the didactic innovation is aimed at showing how the repeatability of language sequences in the narration of the exercises affects the development of students' grammatical and lexical competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has established that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties producing inflectional morphology, in particular, finiteness marking. However, other categories of inflectional morphology, such as possessive 's nominal inflection remain relatively unexplored. Analyses of the characteristics for marking inflection, such as allomorphic categories, may increase our understanding of patterns within disordered grammar to inform the design of interventions and target selection. Data from n = 30 early school-aged children (M = 75 months, SD = 3.38, range = 69–81 months) with DLD were analysed to develop a profile of inflectional morphology skills. Morphological categories included expressive regular past tense, third person singular, and possessive 's. Skills were profiled using an elicitation task. The relationships between expressive morphosyntax, and phonological short-term memory and working memory were also explored. Children demonstrated low accuracy in performance across all inflectional categories, including possessive 's. There were no significant differences between productions of different morphemes, but syllabic allomorphs ([əd]; [əz]) were produced with significantly lower accuracy than segmental allomorphs ([d], [t]; [z], [s]) across all morphological categories. All correlations between expressive morphosyntax and measures of memory were non-significant. Children with DLD show broad deficits in the ability to mark for inflection, including possessive 's; this has implications for theories explaining DLD. Findings may contribute to the design of urgently needed interventions for this clinical population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tejuelo: Didáctica de Lengua y Literatura is the property of Tejuelo. Didactica de la Lengua y la Literatura. Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan. Examining verbal allomorphy shows the persistence of exceptions to historical sound changes in contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, and reveals striking contrasts with the culturally dominant Tibetic languages of the area. We examine the ways in which some of the allomorphy is motivated by patterns seen in the phonology of the language more widely, while some of the changes reflect purely (arbitrary) morphophonological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on morphological structure, complexity and change in both the area of morphology and that of creolistics by revisiting the phenomenon of verb form alternation in Mauritian Kreol (I will from here onwards refer to the language as Mauritian for readability even though speakers refer to it as kreol.), a French lexified creole. Using a lexical database of 2039 distinct verbs, I show that contrary to previous assumptions, the verb alternation found in Mauritian cannot strictly be reduced to phonological or morphosyntactic principles. I argue that Mauritian has evolved a purely morphological distinction between two verb forms of the same lexeme (a long and a short form) whose heterogeneous distribution can be characterized as morphomic (Aronoff, 1994; Maiden 2018)—and therefore as contributing significantly to the system's integrative complexity (Ackerman and Malouf 2013). The existence of morphomic structure crucially weakens repeated claims about creoles' 'exceptional' status. The diachronic emergence of the alternation does not in fact constitute grammatical simplification. Rather, Mauritian verb forms are a reflex of the French paradigmatic organization whose function is exapted in the linguistic ecology in which Mauritian emerged. The type of recalibration witnessed in the Mauritian verb system offers a new lens into creole genesis, which is consistent with the view that morphology is a complex adaptive system whose development is driven by discriminative learning and communicative constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Forma y Funcion is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the implicational patterns present in the Estonian verb paradigm: which paradigm slot acts as the base form, which slots act as other principal parts, and what their hierarchical dependency looks like. The argumentation relies on data from three different sources: childrens acquisition of Estonian as their first language; verbal inflectional classes as reconstructed from the 17th century Tallinn variety of Estonian; and statistics from different contemporary corpora. The article arrives at a different implicational schema than the one traditionally considered to hold. The article suggests that the base form is the bare stem (which is used as the 2nd person imperative and prohibitive, as well as for the negation of the present indicative), and that the other three principal parts are the infinitive; the word-form representing simultaneously the past participle impersonal and the past indicative negative impersonal; and the 3rd person singular of the past indicative. The supine, which is traditionally regarded as the base form, is relegated to being dependent on the 3rd person singular of the past indicative. The article acknowledges that the proposed schema causes difficulties with the algorithm of generating paradigm slots for words that now exhibit a strengthening gradation pattern, traditionally considered to be unproductive for Estonian words and even completely missing for verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Japanese verbal suffixes sensitive to the C/V status of the stem-final segment, C-stem alternants are underlying, and regular V-stem alternants result from intervocalic epenthesis of r at stem boundary (de Chene 2016). This "Analysis A" entails that any V-stem suffix not consisting of r plus its C-stem counterpart is irregular and subject to replacement. While the r-Epenthesis rule of Analysis A is naturally understood as a generalization of the r-zero alternation of three suffixes that have shown it since the eighth century, however, the innovative r-initial suffixes of other categories do not appear until the eighteenth. This lag is illuminated by the dialects of Kyūshū, where adoption of Analysis A is blocked by the "bigrade" stem alternation, which in most dialects was leveled in the seventeenth century. Building on a discussion of leveling that treats that phenomenon as a subtype of regularization, it is proposed in explanation of this "bigrade blocking" effect that the order in which alternations become subject to regularization is constrained by the phonological distance between alternants. Investigation of the possibility that the bigrade alternation and Analysis A are related by a triggering effect as well as by a blocking effect then leads to an account of the adoption of Analysis A that, similarly, relies crucially on the concept of phonological distance. Throughout, the focus is on the role of language-internal factors in determining the timing of analogical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how null subjects, generally termed pro in the literature, were licensed and lost historically in English, with special emphasis on the role of verbal inflectional morphology. It is revealed through a corpus search that pro was licensed as a null topic in Old English and Early Middle English but subsequently lost in Late Middle English. This coincides with the period in which English underwent a drastic typological change, going from a topic-prominent language to a subject-prominent language. In order to relate these simultaneous changes, I maintain that the loss of pro and the typological change to the language both resulted from the shift of ϕ-features from Top(ic) to Fin(ite) within the hierarchy of fine-grained functional heads in the CP domain á la Rizzi (1997), and that this is ultimately attributable to the decline of verbal inflectional morphology for number agreement. Thus, as far as the analysis advanced in this paper is successful, the changes under discussion present an intriguing case of syntax-morphology interface in the domain of language change, where micro-level morphological attrition finally results in a large-scale typological shift of a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other Germanic languages, Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite a strong diachronic tendency for change towards weak inflection, strong inflection patterns are available synchronically to speakers to form the past tense and past participle of new or nonce verbs. Using a measure for ‘potential productivity’ developed by Knooihuizen and Strik (Folia Linguist Hist 35:173-200, 2014) for Dutch, we investigate the relative strength of available patterns in Frisian in an elicitation and an acceptability judgment experiment. Despite the multitude of different patterns in the strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment. We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficits in the production of verbal inflection (tense marking, or finiteness) are part of the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage of typical grammatical development. They are also a hallmark of language impairment: they have been used as biomarkers in guiding genetic studies of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and have also been observed in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To determine the detailed nature of finiteness abilities in subgroups of ASD [autism with impaired language (ALI) vs. autism with normal language (ALN)], we compared tense marking abilities in 46 children with ALI and 37 children with ALN with that of two groups of nonverbal mental age (MA) and verbal MA-matched typically developing (TD) controls, the first such study described in the literature. Our participants' performance on two elicited production tasks, probing third-person-singular -s and past tense -ed, from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI, Rice and Wexler, 2001), revealed extensive deficits in the ALI group: their ability to correctly mark tense was significantly worse than their much younger TD controls', and significantly worse than that of the ALN group. In contrast, the ALN group performed similarly to their TD controls. We found good knowledge of the meaning of tense, and of case and agreement, in both ASD groups. Similarly, both ASD groups showed distributions of null or overt subjects with nonfinite and finite verbs in line with those found in young TD children. A key difference, however, was that the ALI group used (rather than simply omitted) the wrong tense in some sentences, a feature not reported in the OI stage for TD or SLI children. Our results confirm a clear distinction in the morphosyntactic abilities of the two subgroups of children with ASD: the language system responsible for finiteness in the ALN group seems to be functioning comparably to that of the TD children, whereas the ALI group, despite showing knowledge of case and agreement, seems to experience an extensive grammatical deficit with respect to finiteness which does not seem to improve with age. Crucially, our ALI group seems to have worse grammatical abilities even than those reported for SLI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes very rare neuter gender verb forms in the first and second person singular past tense (like byłom, byłoś), the use of which was traditionally constrained to anthropomorphism of objects, whose names were in the neuter grammatical gender. In the contemporary literary texts and internet utterances these forms surface as ways of addressing people - the sender and the recipient in the act of communication. New functions are connected to expressing untypicality, non-normativeness, difficulty of categorizing said people - on the basis of their gender, but also community, ideology and personal affiliations. They can also signal states of temporary confusion. They are used to refer to an unborn child before its sex can be identified or suggest “childlikeness” of an adult person. Forms discussed in the article can also serve as an element introducing multidimensional narration. In literature, they refer to postgender and genderless persons, as well as virtual characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fluminensia is the property of Fluminensia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Diachronic change regarding the Germanic verb shows a tendency away from strong and towards weak inflection, although the change is not unidirectional. Three production and acceptability experiments on nonce and existing verbs in Dutch unveil a clear hierarchy in potential productivity of inflection patterns. Weak inflection has the highest potential productivity; within strong inflection, Classes I, II and III outrank the others. Speakers also regularly employ a productoriented schema based on the vowels /o/ and /ɔ/, as well as, although to a lesser extent, on /i/ and /ɪ/. We relate these findings to synchronic factors and to diachronic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results of two event-related potential (ERP) experiments in which Spanish learners of French and native French controls show graded sensitivity to verbal inflectional errors as a function of the presence of orthographic and/or phonological cues when reading silently in French. In both experiments, verbal agreement was manipulated in sentential context such that subject verb agreement was either correct, ill-formed and orally realized, involving both orthographic and phonological cues, or ill-formed and silent which involved only orthographic cues. The results of both experiments revealed more robust ERP responses to orally realized than to silent inflectional errors. This was true for L2 learners as well as native controls, although the effect in the learner group was reduced in comparison to the native group. In addition, the combined influence of phonological and orthographic cues led to the largest differences between syntactic/phonological conditions. Overall, the results suggest that the presence of phonological cues may enhance L2 readers' sensitivity to morphology but that such may appear in L2 processing only when sufficient proficiency is attained. Moreover, both orthographic and phonological cues are used when available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Song, Sundara & Demuth (2009) find an asymmetrical pattern for verbal inflection errors in child English: They observe more errors in sentence medial position than in sentence final position. To account for this asymmetry, they point towards the surface differences of both sentence positions. A similar asymmetry in Dutch, in which embedded clauses cause fewer problems for verbal inflection than main clauses, has been related to V2 (van Kampen 1997; Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld 1998; Weerman, Duinmeijer & Orgassa 2011). The present study disentangles both explanations (sentence position, i.e. 'phonology' vs. V2, i.e. 'syntax'), and aims to provide a unified account for both the patterns found in English and Dutch. The inclusion of PP-over-V constructions in a sentence repetition task with monolingual Dutch children (aged 4;0 to 6;2) enables us to show that the phonological account proposed for English can account for the Dutch pattern as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the existence of a discontinuous root morpheme in the Semitic languages. Although this notion is often used in the analysis of these languages, it has been claimed in some surface-oriented studies to be a mere theoretical artifact. The first part of this paper presents two arguments from the realm of verbal inflection. It is shown that no surface form can serve consistently as the base for other forms in either Modern Hebrew or Chaha, two Semitic languages. It is further argued that some morphophonological processes in Chaha must be regarded as applying to the root. Applying such processes to the surface stem would result in incorrect forms. The second part of the paper treats discontinuous effects in nominal formations. It is argued that agentive nouns in Modern Hebrew can be built either on another noun or on the root. Without the notion of the root, one is obliged to list all the cases which we propose are root-derived. Such listing obscures the entirely regular and consistently predictable form of root-derived agentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children acquiring languages with rich inflection produce verbal morphology earlier in development than those learning languages with more impoverished inflection. In this paper, I present data from bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish, two null-subject languages with rich morphology which show a lead-lag pattern in the acquisition of inflection. Verbal inflection appears earlier in Spanish than in Basque, and although children produce few root infinitives in either language, they produce fewer in Spanish than in Basque. This is surprising, given that Basque has even “richer” verbal inflection than Spanish insofar as Basque has more obligatory morphological distinctions than Spanish does. These results lead me to propose that a combination of factors facilitate the early emergence of inflection in languages such as Spanish, including nominative/accusative case marking as well as morphological complexity, rather than solely the richness of the verbal paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Dutch dialects show an enormous amount of variation with respect to the verbal inflectional paradigm. To wit, some dialects only have two forms in the present tense indicative to express all persons in singular and plural, whereas other dialects use three or even four different forms to do so. inflectional pattern is equally likely to occur; some patterns are found nowhere, whereas others are geographically widespread and stable over time. We will show that these recurring patterns of syncretism are also typologically well-attested. The recurring pattern involves neutralization of a morphosyntactic distinction in the marked half of the paradigm. More specifically, we see that plural and past tense are neutralizing contexts. We will show that a grammar that solely uses underspecification of affixes to account for the observed syncretisms, misses a generalization that can only be expressed by impoverishment rules or some paradigmatic means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article syncretic patterning in the present indicative paradigm of the verb kloppen (‘to knock’) is described for 355 Dutch dialects taken from the morphological atlas of Dutch dialects (Van den Berg 2003). Following Baerman et al. (2005, The syntax-morphology interface. A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I distinguish syncretisms driven by (universal) feature structure and language specific sources of syncretism. I present independent evidence for the role of phonology, pragmatics and amplification in the formation of syncretic patterns of Dutch. The benefit of the study of the interaction between language specific routes to syncretism and feature structure is threefold. We know language specific routes to syncretism can obscure feature structure. By distinguishing the different routes to syncretism we canalsorevealthe strength of feature structure. Secondly, distinguishing sources of syncretisms enables us to understand similarities and differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of syncretisms. Thirdly, we can link typological data to language acquisition patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a diachronic perspective, Germanic languages are in the process of deflection. In this context, there appears to be a rather chaotic amount of variation within the verbal inflectional paradigms of Dutch dialects. Based on the paradigms of the verb leven (“to live”) in 253 Dutch dialects, we provide a description and a paradigmatic analysis of the variation that we found in verbal inflection in geographically determined, synchronic varieties of Dutch. It turns out that the observed variation is remarkably consistent: there are nine different paradigms, eight of which show a geographically delimited distribution. We discuss the observed geographical variation in the context of Germanic deflection. We argue that variation and deflection are determined by paradigmatic simplification of the feature system involved. We demonstrate that the following economy strategies are relevant: (A) the reduction of the number of distinctive features for a particular affix in an inflectional paradigm: each affix within the Dutch verbal inflectional system is characterized by one phi-feature only; (B) the introduction of a default category [+finite]; (C) the reduction of the number of feature categories in an inflectional paradigm: Dutch inflectional paradigms allow the presence of only one inflectional category ([number], [person], [gender]). These strategies largely determine the realm of variation, within which regional varieties occupy different positions. By doing so, we provide a perspective on paradigmatic change, triggered by properties of the language system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]