Is it dived or dove? Dwarfs or dwarves? If the best students aced the test, did the prettygood students beece it? This book is designed to help readers make sense of morphological change and, more generally, of the concept of analogy and its role in language and in human cognition.
Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg
Using a database of over 86,000 verb tokens from autograph texts by fifty-one Nuremberg natives between 1356 and 1619, this study investigates the changes in verbal inflection during the Early New High German period and their implications for morphological and diachronic theory. It describes nearly all instances of change or variation in verbal inflection found in the texts. Key changes include the leveling of certain stem-vowel alternations among strong, weak, and preterite-present verbs; consonant alternation leveling linked to Verner's Law; regularizations of originally strong and preterite-present verbs alongside irregularizations of weak verbs; shifts in the lexical distribution of the past-participle prefix ge-; and alterations in various forms of the verb sein. The extensive data, diverse writers, and innovative analysis methods allow for a more detailed description of these changes than previously available. This empirical research lays the groundwork for discussing theoretical questions, such as the influence of iconicity, system congruity, and frequency on morphological change; the directionality of analogical leveling; the adequacy of connectionist models for morphological processing; the nature of morphological haplology; and the connection between sociolinguistic variation and diachronic change.