By using the system of Ancient Greek verb endings as a case study, this paper deals with the cross-linguistically recurrent appearance of inflectional paradigms that, though generally characterized by cumu- lative exponence, contain segmentable a??semi-separatea?? endings in cor- respondence with low-frequency cells. Such an exponence system has information-theoretic properties which may be relevant from the point of view of morphological theory. In particular, both the phenomena of semi-separate exponence and the instances of syncretism that con- form to the Br??ndalian Principle of Compensation may be viewed as diff erent manifestations of a same cross-linguistic tendency not to let a paradigma??s exponent set be too distant from the situation of equiprobability.??.
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