An integrated representation of Romanian 3rd person declensions

• Main Author: John S. Lumsden
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2014-11-01
• Series: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics
• Subjects: inflection; procedural; network; Romanian; oddments
• Online Access: http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BWPL_2014_nr.2_-LUMSDEN.pdf

This paper proposes an analysis of the data of thirteen Romanian declensions. The analysis is constrained by the premise that regular and productive grammatical forms and structures are processed by a task-specific procedural memory, while declarative memory processes only the root forms that carry the conceptual content of nouns, verbs and adjectives and the irregular and non-productive grammatical forms (cf. Paradis and Gopnik 1994, Ullman and Gopnik 1994, 1999, Ullman 2001, 2004, Paradis 2004, 2009, etc.). This premise predicts that these grammatical data must be a single cognitive system. The evidence here strongly supports this view. Furthermore, the hypothesis requires an analysis that makes no appeal to declarative principles. The analysis conforms to this constraint.