# Implicative structures in Livonian inflection

Jules Bouton

► To cite this version:

Jules Bouton. Implicative structures in Livonian inflection. Livonica 3 + Minor Finnic Languages 2 = 5, Livonian Institute, Jun 2024, Riga, Latvia. hal-04670004

HAL Id: hal-04670004

https://hal.science/hal-04670004v1

Submitted on 3 Apr 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Implicative structures in Livonian inflection

Declensions have been a major topic of research for Livonian (Viitso 2012), related to the assumed complexity of its morphology. Most of this work was conducted on an empirical basis and hand-in-hand with the growing interest for a dictionary (Viitso and Ernštreits 2012), providing tools to both study and learn the language.

Moreover, implicative morphology (Wurzel 1984) has become a central field of research in the last decades, using information theory to capture paradigmatic relations that were hard to describe with previous approaches (Ackerman, Blevins, and Malouf 2009). Zeprina-Jaz Ainsworth (2019) recently provided an empirical examination of Livonian data in this framework, making assumptions on the opacity (resp. predictability) of paradigm cells.

However, computational methods that recently emerged offer a general strategy to study implications and made new typological comparisons possible (Beniamine 2018). For this talk, we used such methods to study paradigmatic predictability in Livonian. While these methods were abundantly described in previous works, they were barely applied to minority languages due to lack of data. The database of inflected forms developed at the Livonian Institute provides the required basis for such an attempt. The database was first transcribed in a phonemic writing. Alternation patterns were then computed between pairs of forms. Finally, these patterns were used to calculate a score of predictability from one paradigm cell to another.

We will compare these scores with Zeprina-Jaz Ainsworth's claims and with traditional descriptions of Livonian. We will emphasize two key issues: the identification of principal parts in Livonian and the delimitation of Livonian declensions. Since our approach relies on an exhaustive analysis of the available data, we are able both to discuss previous empirical results on these questions and highlight new properties of Livonian paradigms.

References

Ackerman, Farrell, James P. Blevins, and Robert Malouf (2009). "Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms." In: *Analogy in grammar: form and acquisition*. Ed. by James P. Blevins and Juliette Blevins. Oxford linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 54–82.

Ainsworth, Zeprina-Jaz (2019). "Declension Classes in Livonian – a Language-User Abstractive Approach." In: *Linguistica Uralica* 55.1, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.3176/lu.2019.1.01.

Beniamine, Sacha (2018). "Classifications flexionnelles. Étude quantitative des structures de paradigmes." PhD thesis. Université Sorbonne Paris Cité - Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7).

Viitso, Tiit-Rein (2012). "Concerning Inflection Classes in Livonian." In: *Linguistica Uralica* 48.1, pp. 12–26. doi: 10.3176/lu.2012.1.02.

Viitso, Tiit-Rein and Valts Ernštreits (2012). *Līvōkīel-ēstikīel-leṭkīel sōnārōntōz = Liivieesti-läti sōnaraamat = Lībiešu-igauṇu-latviešu vārdnīca*. Tartu: University of Tartu.

Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich (1984). *Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit: ein Beitrag zur morphologischen Theoriebildung*. Studia Grammatica 21. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. doi: 10.1515/9783050080130.