Damaris NŸbling: Was tun
mit Flexionsklassen? Deklinationsklassen und ihr Wandel im Deutschen und seinen
Dialekten
To date, the existence and persistence of
inflectional classes remains largely unexplained – inflectional classes
appear to only produce allomorphs, with no informational gain. There is
hence no shortage of approaches postulating the decline of inflectional
classes, or at least that they are conditioned, i.e. motivated, by external
(non-inflectional) characteristics like semantics, phonology or prosody. Such
approaches ãmotivateÒ weak masculine nominal forms for animate objects or
preterite-present forms for modal verbs. From a linguistic historical
perspective, however, these are exceptional cases.
Inflectional classes are all too seldom considered in
their diachronic and dialectal context, something this article, while
concentrating on noun class in German and its dialects, tries to do. It emerges
that inflectional classes are definitely not in universal decline (indeed, they
are often expanding); rather, the tendency is toward consolidation with the
pronounced word and toward interlinking with other category markers (here, case
and especially number). It is precisely here that a possible use for
inflectional classes can be posited: they enable allomorphic variation, i.e.,
the creation of a pool of inflections from which, using functional criteria of
the so-called ãhost categoryÒ (Wirtskategorie, in this case the plural). The investigation of five
dialects further reveals that inflectional classes are also maintained in
varieties with no written or normative controls, as long as distinctions of
gender – that second, largely arbitrary classification system – are
not reduced.
The article also
focuses on the ambivalent and diachronically variable relation between gender
and inflectional class. The theory is advanced that the two classifications
complement one another and thus reinforce the category of number, to which they
are both linked (gender bolstering the singular, and inflectional class the
plural) – over time, gender has retreated from the plural and
inflectional class from the singular.
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