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Accounting for different rates of gender reanalysis among Icelandic masculine forms in plural -ur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Jón Símon Markússon Open the ORCID record for Jón Símon Markússon [Opens in a new window]
Jón Símon Markússon*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland, Sæmundargata 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland
*
Email: jsm2@hi.is
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Abstract

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

Keywords

frequencygang effectgenderIcelandicinflectional morphologyproductivityprototype structurereanalysisschemasusage-based
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 46 , Special Issue 3: Call for Papers: NJL Special Issue , December 2023 , pp. 331 - 356
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Nordic Association of Linguists

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