Central Pame verbal inflection

Abstract Central Pame verbal inflection constitutes a system whose organization is strikingly complex, with dozens of inflection classes distributed syntagmatically across multiple positions in a word: prefix, suffix, stem, and tone. This paper presents the first thorough description of this understudied system and investigates every layer and subsystem in detail and how they relate to each other, concluding that, in this distributed-exponence system, syntagmatic predictability relations between subsystems are fundamental