Stammkonstanz ohne Stützformen

Abstract

AbstractIn German as in several other languages, the written forms of stems are often more constant than their spoken forms. This has traditionally been described in at least two different ways. In one approach, spelling encodes the abstract sound representations of morphemes, therefore ignoring sound variation at successive levels; in another approach, the spelling of the stems is determined by privileged base forms. In this paper, I analyse the constant spelling of stems in inflection as a case of paradigm uniformity, doing without abstract sound representations and privileged base forms.