A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch

Abstract

Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.

There is no generalizability crisis

“…The advantage of corpus-based studies is that they have higher ecological validity, as they work with naturally occurring data. Additional advantages are (i) the scale of the data, which are usually extracted from corpora that cover millions to even billions of words, reducing the risk of underpowered results; (ii) the high replicability, as the corpora are usually publicly available; and (iii) the possibility to gather data from the past, alleviating the present-day bias to some extent (Bergs & Hoffmann, 2017;De Smet & Van de Velde, 2020;Hundt, Mollin, & Pfenninger, 2017;Petré & Van de Velde, 2018;Wolk, Bresnan, Rosenbach, & Szmrecsanyi, 2013), though the difficulties and obstacles in historical corpus linguistics should not be underestimated (Van de Velde & Peter, 2020). These advantages assuage Yarkoni's concerns about generalizability.…”

An experimental approach to iconicity in Dutch strong and weak verb morphology

“…A lot is known about the factors that determine this shift. Most importantly, it has been shown that verbs with a high token frequency tend to weaken less than verbs with a low token frequency (Lieberman et al 2007 for English; Carroll et al 2012 for German; De Smet & Van de Velde 2019 for Dutch), though many other factors play a role as well (De Smet & Van de Velde 2020b). Much less is known about the factors determining whether a varying verb shows a strong or weak verb form in a specific context.…”