In Old High German (OHG) inflectional paradigm s , there are five verb stems from which all verb
forms are built, represented by infinitive, present 1 st singular, past 1 st singular, past 1 st plural and
past participle. When they merge into the three stem paradigm s in Modern High German, different
directions of leveling are attested, e.g. the past 1 st singular stem spreads into other past forms in
Strong Class III , while it is leveled by the past 1 st plural stem in Strong Class I & V. The
non consistency of the direction of leveling across strong verbs in the his tory of German remains
unexplained.
An information theoretic approach to the solution to this problem is made , under the assumption
that stems that have higher predictiveness over other stems in OHG paradigm s should be more
likely to serve as the base for leveling in analogical change. In this study, lemmata with a token
frequenc y of 10 or more in Das Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch are examined, with the five base stems
of each lemma morpholo gically segmented . The predictability of one stem in OHG paradigm
infl ected based on another is measured by conditional entropy, i.e. the amount of uncertainty of
the former given the latter. The lower the entropy , the higher the predictiveness o f a projecting
direction from one stem to another.
The results are consistent with the attested direction of leveling in most cases, if verbs in each
strong class are examined individually, e.g. in Strong Class I, the direction of leveling from past 1 st
plural to past 1 st singular enjoys higher predictiveness than the reverse direction , and it is exactly
the attested direction of leveling. The study thus provides evidence that conditional entropy can
play a crucial role in determining the direction of leveling in general, based on the se diachronic
change s in German inf lectional paradigms.
Reference
Ackerman, Farrell & Malouf, Robert. 2013. Morphological Organization: The Low Conditional
Entropy Conjecture. Language . 89. 429 464.
Stump, Gregory & Finkel, Raphael A. 2013.
Morphological Typology: From Word to Paradigm .
Cambridge Un iversity Press.
Das Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch:
https://www.deutschdiachrondigital.de/zugang/
