NDLI: The grammar and typology of plural noun inflection in varieties of German

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Wiese, Richard
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German is not, as generally assumed, an inflectional suffix. As an alternative, an optimality-theoretic constraint-based analysis of final schwa in plurals leads to the proposal that this segment in noun plurals of Standard German arises as an inserted vowel, which is in turn the result of a specific constraint interaction. In the second part of this paper, related noun plurals are studied in a sample of diverse non-standard dialects of German. Morphological and prosodic constraints, through the well-known mechanism of differences in constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory, derive the (non-)appearance of word-final plural schwas in these dialects which are minimally different from Standard German and from each other. The constraints will include those which refer to properties of whole paradigms of word forms, not just to phonological properties of individual words. As an overall descriptive result, a micro-typology of plural formation in varieties of German emerges, and the prosodic phonology of German is demonstrated to play a crucial role in the formation of word forms.
Starting Page	137
Ending Page	173
Page Count	37
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13834924
Journal	The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
Volume Number	12
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15728552
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2009-08-11
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Dialects German language Inflection Inflectional typology Optimality theory Variation Theoretical Languages Syntax Comparative Linguistics Germanic Languages Linguistics (general)
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Arts and Humanities Linguistics and Language

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