Sub-optimal Paradigms in Yiddish

It is well known that the phonological form of a word can depend on its morphological structure. In serial approaches, this follows naturally from the fact that words have derivational histories: morphologically complex words undergo successive levels of phonology as they are constructed. A crucial distinction is typically made, however, between derivational and inflectional morphology. Whereas derived forms generally have clear “bases of affixation”, inflected forms are usually not obviously constructed from one another. For this reason, they do not have the same formal influence on one another.