Die deutsche Pluralbildung zwischen deskriptiver Angemessenheit und Sprachtheorie

Abstract

How many inflectional classes displays the German substantive? As basic as this question may be, a satisfactory answer is still lacking. In this paper, the question will be tackled again, taking into consideration the contribution provided by several recent theoretical approaches to an adequate description and comprehension of the German inflectional system. On the other hand, the intricacies of the German plural constitute an optimal test bed to verify the empirical adequacy of recent theoretical thinking on language.

Modeling Morphology With Linear Discriminative Learning: Considerations and Design Choices

“…The model does not produce a single plural form with an umlaut, even though in corpora umlauted plurals are relatively frequent (see e.g., Gaeta, 2008). Interestingly, the German speakers in McCurdy ( 2019) also tended to avoid umlauted forms (with the exception of Kach → Kächer).…”

“…Unsurprisingly, it has been the subject of a long-standing debate whether a distinction between regular and irregular nouns is useful for German (the debate has mostly focused on the formation of the nominative plural which we accordingly also Gaeta, 2008).…”

“… Most of the classes can appear with both masculine and neuter nouns. Feminine nouns belong mostly to the -(e)n class (97%; Gaeta, 2008 ) . …”

“…He also allows for semantics to co-determine class membership. For instance, masculine animate nouns show a tendency to belong to the -n plural class (see also Gaeta, 2008 ). A further remarkable aspect of the German noun system, especially for second language learners, is that whereas it is remarkably difficult to learn to produce the proper case-inflected forms, understanding these forms in context is straightforward.…”

Categorial shift and morphological differentiation

“…For instance, in the case of the German noun Mann 'man', the default plural form Männer coexists with the semantically more specific plural form Mannen 'vassals, henchmen'; the suffix -en, as in Mannen, is especially found with masculine nouns designating (superior) males: Mensch 'person'/Menschen; Professor 'professor'/Professoren; Hase 'hare'/Hasen; Affe 'monkey'/Affen, etc. (see Gaeta, 2008 for an overview). However, the case of Mann does not constitute a single, isolated instance of lexical differentiation, as does brother, but it is one of several instances of plural doublets that might be seen as giving rise to the formation of a new category.…”