Abstract
Plurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of arbitrary lexical classes and virtually exceptionless generalizations across them. Thus while it is not fully predictable phonologically or semantically which suffix allomorph a plural noun takes and whether it undergoes umlaut (vowel fronting), specific suffixes consistently trigger or block umlaut (Augst 1979; Wurzel 1998; Wunderlich 1999), and all plural forms obey a fixed prosodic template (Wiese 1996b, 2009). This combination of regular and irregular has given rise to the claim that German noun plurals defy a morpheme-based analysis and require global paradigm structure conditions (Bittner 1991; Wurzel 1998; Carstairs-McCarthy 2008) or construction-specific constraints (Neef 1998; Wunderlich 1999; Wiese 2009). In this paper, I present a new, purely concatenative analysis of German plurals combining and extending on elements of the classical autosegmental analyses for German umlaut (Yu 1992; Lieber 1992; Féry 1994) and schwa (Hall 1992; Noske 1993; Wiese 1996b) couched in Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2015; Bermúdez-Otero 2018) and Containment Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993; Revithiadou 2007; van Oostendorp 2008). I show that assuming a general plural suffix consisting of a featurally underspecified segmental root node and a floating Coronal feature allows for a purely phonological explanation of both paradigmatic implications and the templatic shape of noun plurals, which have so far been treated as independent problems, and gives rise to a principled account of apparent exceptions.
Highlights
1.1 Wiese’s and Wunderlich’s dilemmasPlurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of phonologically unpredictable lexical classes and broad, virtually exceptionless generalizations across them
Wiese (1996b, 2009) observes that plurals in the native stratum of German instantiate a consistent prosodic template: Whereas singular nouns may end in any kind of syllable, virtually all plural nouns end in the sequence of a full-vowel syllable and a reduced syllable, headed either by schwa ([@]), (1-a), a-schwa ([5]) (1-b), or by a syllabic sonorant (1-c-f).1 (1) The German plural template (Wiese 1996b, 2009)
The Generalized Nonlinear Affixation approach (GNA, Bermúdez-Otero 2012; Bye and Svenonius 2012; Zimmermann 2017; Paschen 2018) to which I contribute here is a research program which generalizes the tradition of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976; McCarthy 1979; Marantz 1982) and Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1996), where tonal and templatic exponence is interpreted as affixation of partially specified phonological material to all productive cases of nonconcatenative morphology in line with the concatenativist hypothesis in (10): (10) The Concatenativist Hypothesis: Morphology = Concatenation + Phonological alternations
Summary
Plurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of phonologically unpredictable lexical classes and broad, virtually exceptionless generalizations across them. This analytic tension between predictability and idiosyncrasy emerges most clearly in the analyses of Richard Wiese and Dieter Wunderlich. The second, closely related, analytic dilemma is rooted in the fact that German noun plurals differ across two logically independent dimensions (Wunderlich 1999): the choice of a suffix allomorph, already illustrated in (1) and (2), and the presence vs absence of umlaut, the phonological fronting of back and low vowels characteristic of many morphological processes in German.. I will sketch the gist of my approach, which provides a unified account to both Wunderlich’s and Wiese’s generalizations, and solves the analytic double bind they face
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