The Paradigmatic Dimension of Italian Verb Inflection

This paper describes the inflectional system of Italian verbs in terms of the shape of verb stems and their distribution in a paradigm. In this respect, our investigation follows the mainstream of work on the role of paradigms in the description of the Morphology of world languages with a rich inflection, as it has developed over the last twenty five years, since Matthews\u27 influential analysis of Latin Inflection. In particular, we propose here a formal descriptive framework whereby several more or less recent insights into the structure of inflectional paradigms, from the implicative nature of the relation holding among members of inflectional classes (Matthews, Wurzel, Carstairs) to the paradigmatic distribution of stem allomorphy (Aronoff), are dealt with from a unifying, purely morphological perspective. Crucially, this descriptive framework is based on the assumption that the paradigm of a given verb can be characterised by means of a partition of the set of paradigm slots, that is in terms of a specific distribution of paradigm slots into a finite number of equivalence classes. More than one paradigm share the same partition. In our view of things, it is this distribution which tightly constraints, at the appropriate level of abstraction, both stem and affix allomorphy, no matter whether this allomorphy can be accounted for phonologically or otherwise. This claim is illustrated through extensive exemplification of data from Italian conjugation showing how sweeping the generalizations thus obtained are