A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

8.5 Inflectional classes for verbs
8.5.4 Class IV
Class IV verbs are characterized by:
• a bisyllabic infinitive form
• no allomorphic variation in the stem and in the class marker
• deviant person/number suffixes with a -j- element
The stem and the class marking suffix are consistent in all forms throughout
a paradigm, i.e., there is no allomorphy in the stem or class marker. The person/number
suffixes for 3sg.prs, 1du.prs, 3pl.prs, 1sg.pst, 2sg.pst and 3pl.pst
deviate from the corresponding person/number suffixes in other verb classes in
featuring an initial -j- element. A nearly complete paradigm for the verb välldut
‘marry’ is provided in Table 8.21.
Table 8.21: The inflectional paradigm for the Class IV verb välldut ‘marry’
sg du pl
prs 1 st välld-u-v välld-u-jin välld-u-p
2 nd välld-u välld-u-bähten välld-u-bähtet
3 rd välld-u-ja välld-u-ba välld-u-je
pst 1 st välld-u-jiv välld-u-jmen välld-u-jme
2 nd välld-u-je välld-u-jden välld-u-jde
3 rd välld-u-j välld-u-jga välld-u-jin
imp 2 nd n/a n/a n/a
inf välld-u-t conneg välld-u
prf välld-u-m
However, the data in the corpus are not nearly sufficient to provide much more
than the paradigm in Table 8.21. Class IV is likely a relatively small class of verbs;
other potential candidates are årrat 14 ‘fall asleep’, ádnot ‘request’ and tjerrot ‘cry’.
Lehtiranta (1992: 154) includes a paradigm for tjerrot, which appears to pattern
like välldut. 15 The class marking vowel in the infinitive form is thus not restricted
to the -u- indicated in Table 8.21.
14 The verb årrat ‘fall asleep’ should not be confused with the Class III verb årret ‘sleep’.
15 But even the paradigm in Lehtiranta (1992: 154) for tjerrot is marked by inconsistent forms
across dialects. Furthermore, one of my main consultants from the northern side of the Pite
Saami territory stated that her dialect does not use the lexeme tjerrot, but instead vállut ‘cry’.
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