The goal of our contribution is to find an adequate methodological platform for describing and explaining the so-called inter-paradigmatic transition of Slovak verbs from the conjugation prototype česať (“to comb”, 1483 lexemes) to the conjugation prototype chytať (“to catch”). This transition is not linear and smooth. We understand the description of the given phenomenon as the construction of a linguistic model – a “transition scheme” – based on systemic linguistics (specifically, functional and structural linguistics). This platform, with the concepts of function, norm, system, center, and periphery, is compatible with the cognitive concepts of prototype and continuum, which we include in the construction of the model as certain components of the user and practical dimensions. From the point of view of formal morphology, we rely most on the description system of Slovak conjugation by M. Sokolová (2019). We drew material from the Orthographic and Grammatical Dictionary and verified the occurrence of variants on the set of corpora Omnia Slovaca IV consisting of the Slovak National Corpus, specialized corpora and web corpora. We conclude that the goal of the analyzed cross-paradigmatic movement is not the transition of verbs from the prototype česať to the prototype chytať, but rather the optimal balance of definite and indefinite forms of each verb with regard to the defined conjugation prototype under the simultaneous interaction of pragmatic, frequency and phonological factors.
