German noun inflection revisited

Abstract

Cahill & Gazdar (henceforth C&G) have presented their analysis of German noun inflection in issue 35.1 (1999) of this journal. As they emphasize (on page 4), the lexical knowledge representation language DATR they employ is theoretically neutral and can serve to encode descriptions set in entirely diverse theoretical frameworks, not just those that are theoretically close to theirs. The formalism is just as amenable to ‘item and process’ and ‘word and paradigm’ analyses as it is to the affixal ‘item and arrangement’ perspective. Moreover, distinct DATR theories (i.e., concrete descriptions) may differ greatly in their input (queries) and output (returned values) while they share a common structure reflecting the inheritance relations arising from the described phenomena.

In this paper I will present another analysis of German noun inflection, encoded in the same formalism but based on the theory of MINIMALIST MORPHOLOGY developed by Wunderlich and his associates (Wunderlich & Fabri 1995, Wunderlich 1997a, 1999b). In his account German nouns are mapped into tree-based representations of their inflectional paradigms, whereas C&G map tuples of lexemes and inflectional categories (case and number) into individual inflected word forms. The major linguistic gain of my analysis is that the principal strength of Wunderlich's account, the formal description of relations within paradigms, is combined with the formal description of hierarchical relations BETWEEN paradigms, which is central for C&G but given little attention by Wunderlich.