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Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants
Edited by Antje Dammel, Matthias Eitelmann and Mirjam Schmuck
[Studies in Language Companion Series 203] 2018
► pp. 17–56

Plural inflection in North Sea Germanic languages

A multivariate analysis of morphological variation

 | University of Amsterdam | Fryske Akademy
 | University of Wuppertal | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
The present study explores the variation in the plural inflection of eight varieties of Frisian and English, focusing on irregular plural formations. The aim of the study is to identify and assess the significance of the factors which contributed to the preservation and emergence of irregular plural patterns in the investigated varieties. Multivariate regression analysis, which was employed to weigh the significance of individual factors, reveals that the retention and emergence of irregular plural patterns is primarily determined by a combination of three major factors: relative frequency, absolute frequency and salience. These factors can be reduced to underlying cognitive processes, including the storage and retrieval of linguistic information in the human brain. Another relevant factor, semantics, affects the lemma frequency profile, but can gain momentum as a factor in its own right due to analogical co-activation in language processing.
Keywords: irregular plurals, frequency, salience, English, Scots, Frisian, multivariate analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
    • 2.1The origin of present-day irregular plurals
    • 2.2Controlling factors
  • 3.Methodology and database
    • 3.1Corpus data
    • 3.2Interpretative problems
    • 3.3Statistical methods
    • 3.4Operationalising the controlling factors
  • 4.Results of the analyses
    • 4.1Results of the analysis of the historical data
    • 4.2Results of the statistical analyses
      • 4.2.1Archaisms
        • 4.2.1.1Frisian
        • 4.2.1.2English and Scots
      • 4.2.2New irregularities
      • 4.2.3Synchronic complexity of plural formations
  • 5.Discussion: Frequency and semantics
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
  • Abbreviations
Published online: 24 October 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.02ver
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