The subsegmental structure of German plural allomorphy

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11292467
AutoresJochen Trommer (0000-0001-6381-2418, Leipzig University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen39
Número2
Páginas601-656
Fecha de publicación2021-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNatural Language and Linguistic Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0167-806X • E-ISSN: 1573-0859
EditorialSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11049-020-09479-7
OpenAlexW3043325412
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas16
Referencias citadas73

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

Allomorph · German · Linguistics · Morpheme · Noun · Plural · Schwa · Suffix · Verb · Vowel · Computer Science · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research