Complexity in nominal plural allomorphy: A contrastive survey of ten Germanic languages

Dammel, Antje; Kürschner, Sebastian

doi:10.1075/slcs.94.15dam

Cited by 36 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…On the other hand, it has been argued that complex characteristics do not necessarily all contribute equally to complexity (Miestamo 2008:30; Deutscher 2009:249), and the same may hold for opaque characteristics and opacity, such that one cannot compare the overall degree of opacity of two languages by simply counting the opacity features. However, since Norwegian and Icelandic are closely related and, as the results will show, the transparency differences between these languages point almost all in the same direction, it nevertheless seems possible to make a comparison (compare Dammel & Kürschner 2008:258–259; Miestamo 2008:30–31; Deutscher 2009:250).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Icelandic additionally displays cumulation of case, number and gender in full nouns, adjectives, determiners and quantifiers, as shown in example (7) above, leading for instance to a high number of nominal plural allomorphs in this language (Dammel & Kürschner 2008:247–248). By contrast, Norwegian does not demonstrate cumulation in any other nominal elements.…”

Section: Opacity Features In Icelandic and Norwegianmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…By contrast, irregular stem formations in plural nouns in the form of vowel alternations appear to be much more frequent in Icelandic, which displays at least 16 such examples (Einarsson 1949:37, 40, 41, 45; Jónsson 1984:25–32). Also Dammel & Kürschner (2008:248–250) show that Icelandic has a high number of nouns that form their plural by changing the quality of the stem vowel.…”

Section: Opacity Features In Icelandic and Norwegianmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transparency in Norwegian and Icelandic: Language contact vs. language isolation

Olthof¹

2017

Nord J Linguist

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This research studies language contact as a possible cause of differences between languages in their degree of transparency. As transparency is assumed to facilitate intelligibility and learnability, especially for adult L2 learners, it is hypothesized that in particular contact settings with many such learners, languages tend to show increasing transparency. The study tests this hypothesis by investigating transparency in Norwegian, which has been exposed to extensive contact with Low German and Danish, and the relatively isolated Icelandic language. Based on a set of opacity features formulated in Functional Discourse Grammar, the degree of transparency of the two languages is compared. The results show that, as predicted, Norwegian is more transparent than Icelandic, which seems due to an increase in transparency in Norwegian and general opacity maintenance in Icelandic compared to their ancestor Old Norse. The study thus supports the hypothesized relation between language contact and transparency.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Opacity Features In Icelandic and Norwegianmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Opacity Features In Icelandic and Norwegianmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transparency in Norwegian and Icelandic: Language contact vs. language isolation

Olthof¹

2017

Nord J Linguist

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“…For our own purposes we want to emphasize only the fact that relevant empirical-quantitative research in the Germanic languages has focused up to now principally on varieties of English (for example, Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2012). Studies of other Germanic languages have mainly concentrated on (written) standard varieties (for example, Kusters 2003, McWhorter 2004, Dammel & Kürschner 2008). By contrast, this paper aims at testing some central assumptions in research by analyzing data from different standard and nonstandard varieties of German as well as discussing some basic methodological questions and problems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Contact and Morphosyntactic Complexity: Evidence from German

Maitz

Németh

2014

J Ger Ling

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The article focuses on the hypothesis that the structural complexity of languages is variable and historically changeable. By means of a quantitative statistical analysis of naturalistic corpus data, the question is raised as to what role language contact and adult second language acquisition play in the simplification and complexification of language varieties. The results confirm that there is a significant correlation between intensity of contact and linguistic complexity, while at the same time showing that there is a need to consider other social factors, and, in particular, the attitude of a speech community toward linguistic norms.*

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“…Cf Wurzel (1986Wurzel ( , 1989Wurzel ( , 1994,Bittner (1988Bittner ( , 2003,Bittner & Bittner (1990),Köpcke (2000aKöpcke ( , 2000bKöpcke ( , 2002,Dammel & Kürschner (2008),Kürschner (2008). Dammel, Kürsch- ner & Nübling (2010b).…”

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The interaction of gender and declension in Germanic languages

Kürschner

Nübling

2011

Folia Linguistica

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In the Germanic languages, gender and declension are two classification systems with a restricted functional load. Still, both persist in many languages, and in some of these languages they are even intimately interrelated, i.e. gender can be predicted based on declension, or declension can be predicted based on gender. Several Germanic languages and dialectal varieties of German are compared with respect to this link between gender and declension. Based on contrastive data, the interaction seems to depend on the level of complexity, i.e. the number of declensions and genders. When complexity decreases, the conditioning of both categorization systems is either more strongly interrelated (leading to parallelization in the most extreme cases), or gender and declension are dissociated and bound to new, more transparent conditioning factors. The developments are interpreted against the background of the hypothesis that gender and declension are used complementarily in profiling the number category: gender profiles the singular, whereas declension profiles the plural.

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Complexity in nominal plural allomorphy: A contrastive survey of ten Germanic languages

Cited by 36 publications

References 0 publications

Transparency in Norwegian and Icelandic: Language contact vs. language isolation

Transparency in Norwegian and Icelandic: Language contact vs. language isolation

Language Contact and Morphosyntactic Complexity: Evidence from German

The interaction of gender and declension in Germanic languages

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