Allomorphy in the plural morpheme of Old English disyllabic neutera-stem nouns: Analogy and token frequency

• Authors: John Newman
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Many instances of plural number marking in Old English disyllabic neuter a-stem nouns appear uncertain. This is due partly to a want of additional empirical evidence regarding what appears to have been a tension between a high vowel deletion process, by which some disyllabic neuters containing a long root vowel failed to attach the nominative/accusative plural number marker -u, and several analogical extension processes which resulted in irregular attachments of the plural markers -u, -ø, and others. This apparent unpredictability, however, is also due to a lack of agreement about how best to subclassify many disyllabic a-neuters. Various scholars have addressed the problem of the allomorphy at issue here, but their grouping criteria have differed and no one scheme has proven truly satisfactory (cf. Brunner - Sievers 1965; Dahl 1938; Campbell 1959; Wełna 1996). Consequently, determining which disyllabic a-neuters attached the u-plural allomorph regularly and which attached it by analogy as well as which of these neuters suffixed the ø-allomorph regularly and which did so analogically is trouble-some. In an attempt to augment our understanding of allomorphy in the plural morpheme of the Old English disyllabic neuter a-stems, this paper analyzes more than 300 plurals culled from both Early and Late Old English texts, and it proposes, unlike previous treatments, that token frequency was crucial to the analogical processes which so often determined plural marker selection in these nouns.

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 46
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 3-23

Dates

published

2011-01-01

online

2012-02-29

Contributors

author

John Newman

• University of Texas at Brownsville

References

• Bately, Janet (ed.) 1980 The Old English Orosius. London: Early English Text Society.
• Classen, E. - F. E. Harmer (eds.) 1926 An Anglo-Saxon chronicle from British Museum, Cotton MS, Tiberius B. IV. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Clemoes, Peter (ed.) 1997 Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: The First Series. London: Early English Text Society.
• Sedgefield, Walter John (ed.) 1899 King Alfred's Old English version of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae. Oxford: Clarendon.
• Skeat, Walter W. (ed.) 1871-1887 The Four Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian versions (4 vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sweet, Henry (ed.) 1871 King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. London: Early English Text Society.
• Wright, Thomas - Richard Paul Wülcker (eds.) 1884 Anglo-Saxon and Old English vocabularies. London: Trübner.
• Brunner, Karl 1965 Altenglische Grammatik: Nach der angelsächsischen Grammatik von Eduard Sievers. (3rd edition). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Bybee, Joan 2001 Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bybee, Joan 2007 Frequency of use and the organization of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bybee, Joan - Paul Hopper (eds.) 2001 Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Campbell, Alistair 1959 Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Dahl, Ivar 1938 Substantival inflexion in Early Old English, vocalic stems (Lund Studies in English 7). Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.
• Fulk, R. D. 2010 "The roles of phonology and analogy in Old English high vowel deletion", Transactions of the Philological Society 108: 126-144.[WoS]
• Hogg, Richard M. 2000 "On the (non-)existence of High Vowel Deletion", in: Aditi Lahiri (ed.), 353-377.
• Ker, Neil Ripley 1957 Catalogue of manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon. Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kiparsky, Paul - Wayne O'Neil 1976 "The phonology of Old English inflexions", Linguistic Inquiry 7: 527-557.
• Lahiri, Aditi (ed.) 2000 Analogy, levelling, markedness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Lass, Roger 1994 Old English: A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Liuzza, R. M. (ed.) 2000 The Old English version of the Gospels. Vol. II. London: Early English Text Society.
• Murray, J. A. H. et al. (eds.) 1989 The Oxford English Dictionary. (2nd edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Smith, K. Aaron 2001 "The role of frequency in the specialization of the English anterior", in: Joan Bybee - Paul Hopper (eds.), 361-382.
• Taylor, Ann - Anthony Warner - Susan Pintzuk - Frank Beths (eds.) 2003 The York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose. Oxford: Electronic texts and manuals available from the Oxford Text Archive.
• Venezky, Richard L. - Antonette diPaolo Healey 1980 A microfiche concordance to Old English. Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
• Wełna, Jerzy 1996 English historical morphology. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
• Wright, Joseph - Elizabeth Mary Wright 1925 Old English grammar. London: Oxford University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10121-010-0009-2