Nominal inflection classes in verbal paradigms

It is not uncommon for inflected nominal forms to be incorporated into verbal paradigms, as in Imonda progressive construction tōbtō soh-ia ale-f ‘he is looking for fish (lit. fish search-loc stay-prs)’, where the verbal noun ‘search’ is in the locative case. Equally, nominal inflection classes are not uncommon. But the two rarely cooccur. We present two case studies (the only examples we are aware of) as a contribution to the typology of inflection class systems: the Western Nilotic language Nuer, and Old Irish. In these languages nominal inflection class distinctions in case marking have become part of the verbal paradigm through the incorporation of constructions involving deverbal nouns. This provides a unique context for observing the properties of inflection classes. In Nuer, case inflection of the verbal noun can be deduced through a cascading series of implicatures, laying bare processes which are entirely covert in the ordinary noun system. With Old Irish, its transition to the modern period was accompanied by a split in the behaviour of verbal nouns, whose inflection class system was simplified when used verbally, but left intact in other contexts, showing that incorporation into the verbal paradigm had real effects on the system.