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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2020

Isabeau De Smet  and
Freek Van de Velde
Isabeau De Smet
Affiliation:
University of Leuven; Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
Freek Van de Velde
Affiliation:
University of Leuven
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 241 - 265
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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