Varför smörgåsar och inte smörgäss? : Om problemet med oregelbunden plural i sammansättningar

Abstract

The plural -ar in smorgasar for smorgas ‘sandwich’ is regular – even though gas ‘goose’, here used as a simplex, takes an irregular plural, gass ‘geese’. Why is the form smorgass not used? Similarly, for trefot, lit. three foot, ‘tripod’, neither trefotar nor the irregular trefotter seems right. To use an irregular plural in such compounds tends to evoke a core reading (“karnbetydelse”) of the right-hand segment: a “bird reading” for smorgass and a “human foot reading” for trefotter ‘tripods’. On the other hand, plurals, such as gasar and fotar sound unknowledgeable. The choice of a plural form may thus present a normative problem. This article investigates how SAOL 14 (2015), The Swedish Academy word list, and Svensk Ordbok (2009) handle this conflict, and compares their recommendations to the actual use of such forms on the Internet. It also presents an answer as to why irregular plural forms can be problematic in compounds: An irregular plural (mediated by a lexical class marker) fixates the meaning of word-sized phrasal constituents to the core meaning of the root. This meaning is retained in compounds. For compounds that do not have a determinative reading, a conflict may arise, for example between the conventional plural of fot, fotter – crucially with the meaning ‘human feet’ –, and the meaning of trefot ‘tripod’, which does not involve human feet. Apart from N+N compounds an extension is made to adjectival and verbal compounds, and also to simplex words. (Less)