Stem relations and inflection class assignment in Italian

The paper proposes a reassessment of the division of Italian verbs into classes, and proposes a model for the mental representation of inflectional paradigms. The treatment is rooted in a thematic model of morphology, according to which the identification of a unique (basic) form for lexemes is not a priority, not even for the regular ones. Rather, it is assumed that lexemes may be stored in the lexicon as complex entries containing different phonological forms, called stems. The model proposed aims at reducing complexity not by reducing all forms to unity, but by describing the relations between stems and by reducing the inventory of their possible configurations, or stem spaces.