Predictability in Latin Noun Inflection and the Role of Gender

We will now switch our focus from verbs to nouns. The structure of the first part of this chapter is analogous to the previous one. In Sect. 5.1, we provide some preliminary information on the inflectional behaviour of Latin nouns, as it is described in traditional grammars. We also review some (more or less) recent theoretical accounts of the well-known facts. In Sect. 5.2, we present the results of our systematic analysis of implicative relations and predictability in noun inflection. The shape of the cell paradigm of Latin nouns—on which our computations are done—is shown in Sect. 5.2.1. The results concerning unary and n-ary implicative entropy are then given in turn in Sects. 5.2.2 and 5.2.3. In the latter section, the principal parts and near principal parts that can be inferred from the entropy-based analysis are discussed. The remaining part of the chapter is devoted to a topic that, unlike verbs, proves to be relevant for nouns: the role of information on a lexeme’s gender in reducing uncertainty in inflectional predictions. How do entropy values change if we assume that we do not only know the phonotactic shape of an inflected wordform but also the gender of the lexeme it belongs to? We begin by providing some examples that show information on gender is at least potentially available to speakers and capable of yielding a reduction in implicative entropy (Sect. 5.3.1). We then briefly show some quantitative data on the distribution of Latin nouns among the three genders, both in absolute terms and in their relationship with the classification in the traditional five declensions, highlighting some clear preferential associations between a noun’s declension and its gender and their impact on uncertainty in the PCFP (Sect. 5.3.2). We finally present the results that are obtained by taking gender information into account in Sect. 5.3.3, discussing the relevance of such results in the debate on the function(s) of gender, but also some caveats that should be made on their reliability, in Sect. 5.3.4. The findings of the chapter are then summarized in Sect. 5.4.