Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Carol Fehringer
This paper examines the diachronic development and synchronic status of morphological doublets in Dutch derivation (adjectives in -(e)lijk) and German inflection (genitives in -(e)s) in the light of the commonly held view that functionally equivalent doublets are rare in morphology and, where they do exist, tend to be small in number and diachronically unstable (see, for example, Kroch 1994). It is shown here that large numbers of doublets can thrive for centuries, despite the fact that they require a high degree of arbitrary lexical information, while others tend to be eliminated systematically by organizing words into lexical “gangs” defined by phonological and morphological properties. It is also argued that the lexically conditioned nature of the inflectional doublets provides evidence for the wholesale lexical listing of German genitives.
Author(s): Fehringer C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Germanic Linguistics
Year: 2004
Volume: 16
Issue: 4
Pages: 285-329
Print publication date: 01/12/2004
Date deposited: 13/12/2007
ISSN (print): 1470-5427
ISSN (electronic): 1475-3014
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1470542704040425
DOI: 10.1017/S1470542704040425
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric