Canonicity and complexity in the Spanish verbal system: implications for teaching/learning processes

Inflectional systems present, among other characteristics, a variable degree of internal congruence, as their internal configuration results from the tension that occurs between a certain tendency to complexity, associated with the absence of internal congruence, and to systematicity, understood in terms of canonicity. On the other hand, users of a language, and particularly learners, tend to interpret its inflectional system according to congruence patterns that may not only be different from those considered proper to that system, but even have the effect of increase its complexity. We show that a characterization based on such features allows a simpler representation of the paradigms of the verbal lexemes, by requiring only those forms that are unpredictable ('principal parts', Stump & Finkel 2013, 2015). Such forms fall into two types of relationships: doubly implicational or symmetrical relationships between them, linked to processual affinities, and implicational or asymmetrical relationships with predictable forms, associated with formal affinities. We compare the implications of this type of representation with others based exclusively on formal affinities and sublexical units, and we highlight the theoretical and pedagogical interest of generalizations based on the concept of 'principal part'.