Andrea D. Sims: Inflectional defectiveness

Abstract

The Russian verb pobedit’ ‘conquer’ shows what Sims calls canonical defectiveness, “the complete lack of any word-form filling a given paradigm cell […] in the context of a maximal expectation that there should be some form corresponding to that cell” (250). That cell is the first-person singular nonpast, in which *pobežu is bad and so are *pobedju and *pobeždu. In this wide-ranging study she cites data from two dozen languages and employs a variety of tools like statistical analysis and information theory in order to provide a context for understanding the defectiveness of pobedit’.