Defective verbs in Portuguese: a morphomic approach

This article provides evidence via a statistical analysis of corpus data that defectivity in Portuguese constitutes a psychological reality for speakers. It then argues that the morphome-based explanation for Spanish defective verbs is the most appropriate to explain defectivity in Portuguese. Morph...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCognitive linguistics Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 153 - 181
Main Author O’Neill, Paul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin De Gruyter 26.05.2025
Mouton de Gruyter
Subjects
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive linguistics
Corpus analysis
defective verbs
frequency
Language
Linguistics
Morphology
morphomes
paradigms
Portuguese language
Semantics
Spanish language
Statistical analysis
Syncretism
Verbs
Word meaning
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Summary:This article provides evidence via a statistical analysis of corpus data that defectivity in Portuguese constitutes a psychological reality for speakers. It then argues that the morphome-based explanation for Spanish defective verbs is the most appropriate to explain defectivity in Portuguese. Morphomes are abstract distributional patterns of allomorphy based on form-form correspondences alone. The importance of these patterns has not been fully recognised within cognitive linguistics due to their lack of reference to meaning. Morphomes may not be ‘meaningful’ in the narrow sense, i.e. relating to ‘system-external information’, however, they are in the broader sense of them being ‘informative’. Morphomes are extremely informative since they exhibit systematic patterns of form that have a high predictive value within the morphological system. Within such a broader conception of meaning, morphomes have essentially the same predictive value as ‘meaning-driven’ patterns. In this article I present further evidence in favour or morphomes and I argue that Cognitive Linguistics should be open to the possibility of the importance of form-form relationships.
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ISSN:0936-5907
1613-3641
DOI:10.1515/cog-2023-0034