A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch

Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage variation and change Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 241 - 265
Main Authors De Smet, Isabeau, Van de Velde, Freek
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.07.2020
Subjects
Ablaut
Corpus analysis
Corpus linguistics
Diachronic linguistics
Dutch language
Germanic languages
Inflection (Morphology)
Language change
Morphology
Participles
Quantitative analysis
Suffixes
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Summary:Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.
ISSN:0954-3945
1469-8021
DOI:10.1017/S0954394520000101