Inflection and the Paradigm in German Nouns

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of noun inflection in Modern Standard German within a process framework. Familiar issues in the description of German inflectional morphology are discussed, such as analysis of weak nouns and of plural formation, and the establishment of inflectional classes, as well as broader theoretical issues such as postulation of identity relations (“zeros”). The elements of a process morphology are elaborated, including some that deviate from well-known models, such as recognition of a dynamic morphological component distinct from the static lexicon, expression of morphological semantics in the morphological component, and formalization of the notion of a paradigm. The paradigm is claimed to be an essential morphological structure, dynamic in nature, responsible for organization of the inflectional system and ensuring, in cooperation with operations applied to stems, correct sequencing and selection of these inflectional operations. It is also concluded that the inflectional class, derivative of the paradigm, may be a useful construct in some languages (including German), but is not a necessary one for all inflecting languages.

The subsegmental structure of German plural allomorphy

“…The bulk of the theoretical literature on German noun plurals either focuses on its phonological-prosodic shape (Wiese 1996b(Wiese , 2009Neef 1998) or on the paradigmatic restrictions governing suffix allomorphy and umlaut (Carstairs-McCarthy 1987;Wurzel 1998;Pounder 1996;Kilbury 2001;Wiese 2000;Yang 2016). 27 Thus a major advantage of the subsegmental concatenation approach developed here is that it achieves a unified account of both aspects.…”

The paradigmatic aspect of compounding and derivation

“…Paradigms are considered descriptively and theoretically essential for explaining inflectional relations and inflectional morphology in the Word-and-Paradigm (WP) approach (e.g. Anderson 1982; Stump 1991, 2016; Pounder 1996; Carstairs-McCarthy 1998; Spencer 2001) and other (word-based) approaches (such as those proposed by Wurzel 1989, Plank 1991, and Williams 1994). Importantly, paradigms are proposed also for derivational morphology (e.g.…”