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In:Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants
Edited by Antje Dammel, Matthias Eitelmann and Mirjam Schmuck
[Studies in Language Companion Series 203] 2018
► pp. 93–118

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The history of the mixed inflection of German masculine and neuter nouns

Sound shapes, dialectal variation, typology

 | Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Published online: 24 October 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.04ron
Abstract
This paper provides an investigation of the dialectal spread of the “mixed” inflection (i.e. the combination of a “strong” singular with a “weak” plural) to non-feminine German nouns from the 14th to the 19th century, thereby revealing three different lines of development: Mixed inflection is well attested in Upper German, but poorly so in Low German and East Central German, whereas the standard language combined both traditions in the 18th century, depending on the sound shape of the respective nouns. It is only at the transition from the 19th to the 20th century that “mixed” inflection was almost lost entirely with non-feminine nouns, thus becoming a signal of feminine gender. A typological explanation relying on syntactic framing in German is proposed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and lay-out of the study
  • 3.Sound shapes of masculine and neuter nouns with mixed inflection
  • 4.Chronological and dialectal distribution of the major sound shapes
  • 5.Competing typological tendencies as an explanation of the development
  • 6.Summary and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (25)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke
2020. The role of the definite article in the rise of the German Framing Principle. In Walking on the grammaticalization path of the definite article [Studies in Language Variation, 23], ► pp. 97 ff. DOI logo

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