Reshaping of the Nominal Inflection in Early Northern West Germanic

2019

Folia Linguistica

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Studying the complex interaction between phonological and morphological developments involved in the extensive reorganisation of nominal inflection in early English, we focus, primarily, on new inflectional endings that emerged by analogy in etymologically suffix-less paradigm forms of r-stems and root nouns. We argue that the analogical changes were essentially reactive to phonological developments, and to a large extent predictable in statistical terms. Investigating correlations in corpus data, we identify the factors that affected the probability that new analogical endings were adopted. The predictors of the directions of analogical change that we show to be robust include the syllable structure of the root, the salience of inherited and analogical inflectional markers, as well as their absolute and relative frequencies.

Section: Interaction Of Morphology and Phonology In Analogical Realignments In Old English Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological constraints on morphology: Evidence from Old English nominal inflection

Adamczyk

2019

Folia Linguistica

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“…Table 3 presents a correlation between the type of inflectional marker and the percentage of innovative inflection in the plural paradigms of minor stems, juxtaposing the data from Old English and Old Frisian. The figures come from a systematic investigation of the distribution of archaic and innovative forms in the minor paradigms in the respective corpora discussed in Section 3.1 (Adamczyk 2018). In order to account for the patterns found in the Old Frisian material, the figures for the relative plural proportion were included as well.…”

Section: Operationalising the Controlling Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Already at the earliest stage of attestation the declensional systems of the Germanic languages were undergoing a gradual process of reorganisation, induced by an interplay of phonological and morphological developments, including phonological reduction and analogical levelling. These tendencies gradually led to a confusion and merger of class-specific inflectional markers in individual Germanic languages and dialects, and contributed to a reduction in the diversity of the inherited inflectional exponents, including those marking specifically the plural (for Old English see, e.g., Kastovsky 1995Kastovsky , 1997Hogg & Fulk 2011;Adamczyk 2010Adamczyk , 2013Adamczyk , 2014Adamczyk , 2018. With time, the distribution of plural markers tended to become increasingly determined by phonology and gender (as was the case with the masculine nouns in -e in Middle Dutch, which became feminine, in contrast to feminine nouns ending in a consonant, which became masculine (Van Loey 1976: 19, 23)), or guided by semantics (as in the case of the s-stems, representing predominantly agrarian vocabulary, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plural inflection in North Sea Germanic languages

Reorganising Grammatical Variation

Adamczyk

2018

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The present study explores the variation in the plural inflection of eight varieties of Frisian and English, focusing on irregular plural formations. The aim of the study is to identify and assess the significance of the factors which contributed to the preservation and emergence of irregular plural patterns in the investigated varieties. Multivariate regression analysis, which was employed to weigh the significance of individual factors, reveals that the retention and emergence of irregular plural patterns is primarily determined by a combination of three major factors: relative frequency, absolute frequency and salience. These factors can be reduced to underlying cognitive processes, including the storage and retrieval of linguistic information in the human brain. Another relevant factor, semantics, affects the lemma frequency profile, but can gain momentum as a factor in its own right due to analogical co-activation in language processing.

“…In other words, the fact that many traces of the language of R1 are innovative, rather than archaic (Bremmer 2007: 36), does not contest the observation that some of the Riustring features continue an earlier stage of Frisian that is no longer attested in other, contemporaneous manuscripts. Chief among these archaisms would then be the preservation of three vowel qualities in unstressed syllables, instead of two, and a more limited amount of analogical levelling in the nominal paradigms (Adamczyk 2017). As another example of a synchronically archaic language, one may think of Modern Icelandic, which is old-fashioned in many respects, but innovative in terms of various phonological features.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Riustring Old Frisian -ar Plurals: Borrowed or Inherited?

2017

Amst Beitr alteren Ger

Rolf Bremmer (2007) concludes that the language of the Old Frisian Riustring manuscripts shows traces of copying from texts written in other Old Frisian dialects, notably from the Ems region. The strongest indication for his hypothesis comes from the masculine plural ending -ar, which is the rule in Ems Old Frisian but the exception in R1 and absent from other Riustring manuscripts. In this contribution, Bremmer’s hypothesis is partly confirmed, but augmented with the reconstruction of an indigenous Riustring plural ending -ar in masculine a-stem nouns denoting an animate subject, which appear substantially more often in the nominative. Nouns with a higher frequency of occurrence in the accusative take the plural ending -a. This is taken to reflect a former Proto-Frisian situation, with the ending -ar in the nom. pl. of masculine a-stem nouns against -a in the acc. pl., similar to Old Norse. The earlier distribution had become lexicalised by the time of Riustring Old Frisian. Some of the attested instances, however, are better explained as remnants of a copying process from Ems Old Frisian.