This article takes a quantitative approach to the long-term dynamics of the preterite inflection in West Germanic, with a special focus on Dutch. In a first step, we replicate two often-cited studies on English and German (Lieberman et al. 2007 and Carroll et al. 2012, respectively) by looking at Dutch. This part also tackles some methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. In a second step, we delve deeper into the evolution of the preterite morphology in Dutch in the last 1200 years, by looking at several factors which have been previously only investigated in isolation or on limited time slices. Using multiple binomial regression analysis, the various factors are studied under multifactorial control.
Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e. g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection (spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronically this might result in variable verbs (e. g., schuilen – schuilde/school ‘hide – hid’ or raden – raadde/ried ‘guess – guessed’). This diachronic (1300–2000) corpus study shows that this variation is not haphazard, but that semantic factors are at play. We see two such effects. First of all, synchronically, the variation is exapted in an iconic manner to express aspect: durative meanings tend to be expressed by longer verb forms and punctual meanings tend to be expressed by shorter verb forms. Secondly, we see that metaphorical meanings come to be associated within obsolescent inflectional forms, as predicted by Kuryłowicz’s “fourth law of analogy”.
In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced inPijpops & Van de Velde (2016). Constructional contamination bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse of the utterances they interpret, but instead often rely on ‘shallow parsing’ and the storage of large, unanalyzed chunks of language in memory, as proposed inFerreira, Bailey, & Ferraro (2002),Ferreira & Patson (2007), andDąbrowska (2014).Pijpops & Van de Velde (2016)investigated a single case study in depth, namely the Dutch partitive genitive. This case study is reviewed, and three new case studies are added, namely the competition between long and bare infinitives, word order variation in verbal clusters, and preterite formation. We find evidence of constructional contamination in all case studies, albeit in varying degrees. This indicates that constructional contamination is not a particularity of the Dutch partitive genitive but appears to be more wide-spread, affecting both morphology and syntax. Furthermore, we distinguish between two forms of constructional contamination, viz. first degree and second degree contamination, with first degree contamination producing greater effects than second degree contamination.
Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.
In Dutch, some verbs can vary in their preterite and past participle form. These verbs can either take the strong inflection (using ablaut, e.g. schuilen-school-gescholen 'hide-hid-hidden') or the weak inflection (adding a dental suffix, e.g. schuilen-schuilde-geschuild 'hide-hid-hidden'). In a diachronic corpus study, De Smet & Van de Velde (2020) show that this variation can be exapted to express aspect in an iconic manner. Their results indicate that weak preterites are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter strong variants are used more often in punctual contexts. For the past participles, this image is reversed: the longer strong variants are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter weak variants are used more often in punctual contexts. In this paper, we seek experimental validation of these results. Furthermore, we also distinguish between preterite singulars and preterite plurals, as we expect the iconicity effect to be less obvious for the latter, given that the difference in length between the strong and weak preterite plural is negligible (e.g. schuilden vs. scholen). Participants were presented with a forced choice task where they had to choose between weak or strong preterites and past participles of nonce verbs in sentences suggesting either a durative or a punctual context. Though no general effect of aspect on verb inflection was found, results indicate a trend for a particular group of verbs that supports the corpus results from De Smet & Van de Velde (2020). Furthermore, the durative-punctual distinction was also found to be portrayed in yet another iconic manner: verb forms with vowels that are sound symbolically associated with slow long movements were used more often in durative contexts, while verb forms with vowels that are associated with quick, short movements were used more often in punctual contexts.
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