Optimality Theory and Natural Morphology: An Analysis of German Plural Formation*

Abstract

This paper analyzes the system of Modern Standard German (MSG) noun plural formation in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, hereafter OT). We concentrate our analysis on the thorny issue of why vowel mutation (umlaut) in the stem is used in combination with other plural suffixes or alone in order to mark plurality. In this paper, we maintain that a historical process of umlaut ceased early on to be an active phonological process in German. Umlaut became reinterpreted as a morphological marker of plurality which then spread analogically into other classes. We then capture the synchronic distribution of plural markers in Standard German using a set of independently motivated constraints and constraint rankings based both on phonological properties of the lexical input and on universal principles of morphology adapted from current work in Natural Morphology (Mayerthaler 1981, Wurzel 1984a; hereafter NM). We show that OT can provide a principled analysis of the umlaut+suffix plurals and predict more natural patterns of plural formation in non-standard dialects and the responses of native speakers to nonce word experiments. In several respects, general principles of NM anticipate developments in OT, although this has not been generally acknowledged. In this paper, we make explicit the relationship between two theories that share much of the same conceptual ground. Specifically, we incorporate NM ideas of markedness, iconicity, and uniformity into an OT constraint framework