Germanic strong verbs: A case of morphological rule extension?

Reduplication and Ablaut in the Germanic Strong Verb

“…Whereas be a direct continuation o P IE (Flasdieck 1936, 352-56 Barnes and Esau (1973) have recently shown that the retention of a separate reflex of ti at least might have been made possible by the monophthongization of its short partner ei to i. The hypothesis we are proposing is thus that the two major branches of Gmc., Gothic and NWGmc., regularized the anomalous rag-bag of verbs which constitute the seventh class in different ways, using the two major possible exponents of the preterite which were inherited from IE.…”

“…It is above all the lack of supporting parallels for reconstructed developments of the kind proposed by Ludtke which has made many sceptical of them (e.g. Karstien 1921, 41-51; Prokosch 1939, § §61-62; Barnes and Esau 1973). None of the intermediate stages are attested, for the relicts of reduplication in Anglian (heht, leort, etc.)…”

“…Nevertheless, the lack of an obvious inherited gradation which might have been generalized throughout this class, as happened in class VI, is an obstacle. It has long been recognized, though, that the alternations systematized in this class are not restricted to the verbal paradigms: for instance OHG stiugu (with ia from Z2) stands in an ablaut relationship to Gothic staigu, the class I strong verb stigun and thus to the IE root *steigh- (van Coetsem 1956, 27-28 Barnes and Esau (1973) have recently shown that the retention of a separate reflex of ti at least might have been made possible by the monophthongization of its short partner ei to i. An alternative, and currently most widely accepted view is that of van Coetsem (1956;1963), who has suggested that the alternations in class VII arose by reverse analogy to the gradations of the first three classes, the roots of which have similar consonantal structures to those of the seventh class, e.g.…”

Book reviews

“…Inspection of the missing 40 items revealed that 13 were on computational morphology, and six of them dealt with morphological aspects of second-language acquisition. These are plainly marginal to Beard and Szymanek's stated concerns, but the omission of Barbour (1982), Barnes and Esau (1973), Corbett (1981), Durand and Lyche (1978), Moore (1979), Smith (1979), Sommerstein (1975), and Wilbur (1975) is less readily justified. Both Linguistics and Journal of Linguistics are rather heavily represented in this omission list, but the sample is presumably too small to draw any firm conclusion from that observation.…”