Download Jessica Nowak. 2015. Zur Legitimation einer 8. Ablautreihe. Eine

ZRS 2016; 8(1–2): 165–169
Open Access
Jessica Nowak. 2015. Zur Legitimation einer 8. Ablautreihe. Eine kontrastive
Analyse zu ihrer Entstehung im Deutschen, Niederländischen und
Luxemburgischen (Germanistische Linguistik – Monographien 30). Hildesheim,
Zürich, New York: Georg Olms. x, 415 S.
Reviewed by Oscar Strik: University of Antwerp, Stadscampus R.216, Prinsstraat 13, 2100 Antwerp, Belgium, E ˗ Mail: [email protected]
 
 
DOI 10.1515/zrs-2016-0030
The past several years have seen something of a revival of interest in the verbal
inflection of the Germanic languages. While the ‘great past tense debate’ of the
1990s was focused for the most part on the English language and synchronic
psycholinguistic approaches, recent publications have shed more light on the
history of strong and weak verbs in German, Dutch, Frisian, and the Scandinavian
languages (see among others Dammel 2011). Building upon her earlier articles
(e. g. Nowak 2010) this new book by Jessica Nowak is a welcome addition to this
growing body of literature.
The central topic of the book is the titular “eighth ablaut class” (henceforth S8),
a term that refers to a few interrelated but slightly different phenomena in the three
languages under scrutiny. In Dutch and German, it is used to describe the generalized ablaut pattern x–o–o, which is mainly represented by the patterns e–o–o and
i–o–o (e. g. Dutch zenden–zond–gezonden).1 The origins of this pattern lie in the
Early Modern period, where the contrast between the singular and plural past tense
vowels was neutralised. The change of the third ablaut class pattern from the earlier
e/i–a–o–o to e/i–o–o is a significant one, as the shift from an overarching ABC(C)
type to ABB may be seen as kind of partial regularisation that still maintains the
hallmarks of strong inflection—note that weak verbs are also of the ABB type. As
Nowak convincingly argues, for some verbs in Early Modern Dutch and Early
Modern High German the x–o–o pattern forms an alternative to wholesale ‘weakening’, i. e. a shift to weak inflection. This illustrates how in these languages, irregular
and regular are not discrete polar opposites; rather, there is a cline ranging from
complete suppletion on the one end to only suffixation on the other.2
 
 
1 Most members of these patterns were originally members of the third strong class (S3), but it
also includes members of S4 and S5, as well as originally weak verbs.
2 See Dammel (2011: 149–152) on the contrast between polar and scalar inflection systems.
© 2016 Oscar Strik, published by De Gruyter
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In Luxembourgish, the term “eighth ablaut class” instead refers to the use of
the past tense vowel ou, which is used regardless of either the present tense vowel
or the past participle vowel (i. e. the pattern x–ou–x). Among the small number of
strong verbs still remaining in the language (eleven in total), ou has acquired
universal status as the marker of the past tense. The form ou originates in S2, but
has spread throughout the strong verb system from there.
As Nowak shows over course of the book, the German, Dutch, and Luxembourgish situations share common causes: a) the levelling of the vowel alternation between the preterite singular and preterite plural; b) a decreased connection
between the present/infinitive vowel and the other ablaut vowels; c) a relatively
low type frequency of the verbs that shifted towards S8. In this way, an earlier
decrease of stability has led to the emergence of a new kind of stability: a pattern
that is different from the original strong inflection patterns, yet also not weak
inflection, as it lacks suffixes and has vowel alternation. As Nowak argues, these
new patterns do in fact occupy an ‘in between’ position compared to ‘traditional’
strong verbs and weak verbs.
Of particular interest is the fact that the rise of S8 is marked by the emergence
of product-oriented schemas. In Bybee’s network model (see e. g. Bybee 1985 and
later work), which is also argued for by Nowak, these are productive schemas that
are relatively open in terms of their input, but which specify a particular kind of
output form for the grammatical function in question. The x–o–o pattern is a
perfect fit, as the /o/ as a vowel is overwhelmingly associated with past tense
meaning, compared to other vowels. These schemas are actually combined in
Nowak’s analysis with the input-oriented schemas represented by the original i–
o–o and e–o–o patterns to form what is described as the eighth ablaut class.
That the S8 pattern is still somewhat productive in the present day is indicated by the occurrence of jocular forms such as German pfoff ‘whistled’ and
schrob ‘wrote’, Dutch gesnopen ‘understood’, as well as its usage in the inflection
of nonce verbs in Dutch (see Knooihuizen & Strik 2014).
In chapter III.3, Nowak returns to the past tense debate and the choice
between single and dual mechanism models to account for regular and irregular
inflection. She argues in favour of Bybee’s network model (over Connectionist and
Words-and-Rules approaches) as the one that can best account for the empirical
data put forward earlier in the book. The changes involved in the rise of S8 show
subtle moves between regular and irregular inflection, and these are hard to
account for in dual mechanism models that rely on a sharp distinction between
stored irregular forms and generated regular forms. In addition, it is the network
model that is best able to account for both input- and output-oriented schemas.
The principal value of Nowak’s book lies in its great attention to detail when it
comes to describing and explaining the (micro-)variations and changes in the verb
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systems of German, Dutch, and Luxembourgish. The first part of the book is a trove
of information that eminently shows how messy a linguistic subsystem can be
once we zoom in on it. It also serves as a reminder that general statements about
the decline of strong inflection in the Germanic languages should be supplemented by studies such as this that dive into developments at a deeper level.
Critical remarks on the book are minor and confined to just two areas. The
first concerns the structure of the book. While it is interesting to jump straight into
the empirical side of things, as Nowak does in chapters II.1 and II.2, some
information about her theoretical points of departure, particularly when it comes
to the matter of analogy and schemas, would have been welcome at that point.
Thankfully, this information is present in abundance after all, albeit relegated to
the second half. This led to some initial frustrations and doubts about the analysis
of the data, which were assuaged upon reaching the final parts of the book, where
Nowak draws together the main threads while discussing analogy and the role of
schemas in inflectional change.
Secondly, for both the concept of analogy and that of schema, a methodological issue remains in that they are used as descriptions and explanations of
particular changes in the inflection system of Dutch, German, and Luxembourgish, while leaving unexamined the possible influence of alternative schemas and
analogies that might have led to different outcomes than the actual historical
ones. The schemas that Nowak presents are good illustrations of connections that
indeed exist between verbs, but they are never compared to the multitude of other
possible schemas in the system. The same applies to using analogy to explain a
limited set of linguistic changes without applying the principle to a linguistic
subsystem as a whole, weighing all possible analogies against each other in a
modelling approach (see e. g. Hare & Elman 1995; Albright & Hayes 2003).
Finally, Nowak seems to assume a natural kind of analogy between the long
/oː/ of the Dutch and German second strong class and the short /o/ of the third
strong class, or in other words, that x–o:–o: and x–o–o are fundamentally
identical. However, only some S8 verbs use the former while most use the latter. It
is tempting to reduce this to an issue of complementary distribution—a long
vowel before a single consonant and a short vowel before a cluster—and while
this explanation goes a long way, it does not account for a jocular form like
gesnopen from snappen, where one would expect a short vowel instead: *gesnoppen. An alternative explanation is that in the Early Modern Period (and potentially
also in present day German), the patterns are equivalent, and that it is only
present day Dutch /oː/ that is moving in its own direction, where it can be applied
regardless of the consonant structure of the stem.
While they naturally fall outside the scope of this already sizeable book, it is
interesting to mention the presence of a few related phenomena in Frisian and
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English. In West Frisian,3 the x–o–o pattern has a natural presence in S3 verbs,
again as a result of levelling of the past tense vowel towards the plural, just like in
Dutch and German. This class has also been able to attract a sizeable number of
weak verbs with present tense vowel /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ (e.g. klimme–klom–klommen
‘climb’ and flechstje–flocht–flochten). In addition, the pattern has enjoyed a small
degree of productivity among strong verbs that originate in other classes, namely
waskje–wosk–wosken ‘wash’ and fange–fong–fongen ‘catch’. That latter cases can
be analysed as instances of S8.
In English, finally, the change of an ABC to an ABB pattern is also prominent
in particular areas of the strong verb system, not coincidentally in verbs originally
of the third ablaut class (and analogically similar weak verbs that have ‘strengthened’). Next to the original pattern sing–sang–sung, we have strike–struck–struck
and stick–stuck–stuck. In addition, even in verbs that prescriptively still have a
past tense with /æ/, the /ʌ/ forms are sometimes used. These forms, too, may be
seen as English overtures to S8.4
Although the North Germanic languages seem to be exempt from the developments described here,5 it appears that the rise of product-oriented schemas in
strong verb inflection is something that plays a significant role in all West
Germanic languages, from system-defining in Luxembourgish to fairly marginal
in English, with German, Dutch, and Frisian lying somewhere in between. As
such, we are dealing with a cross-linguistic phenomenon in morphological
change, and Nowak’s book is the best and most complete study of it to date.
Literatur
Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes. 2003. Rules vs. Analogy in English past tenses: a computational/
experimental study. In: Cognition 90, 119–161.
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Bybee, Joan L. & Dan I. Slobin. 1982. Rules and schemas in the development and use of the
English past tense. In: Language 58, 265–289.
Dammel, Antje. 2011. Konjugationsklassenwandel. Prinzipien des Ab-, Um- und Ausbaus verbalflexivischer Allomorphie in germanischen Sprachen. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
3 I. e. Westerlauwers Frisian, the language spoken in the Netherlands.
4 As in the movie title Honey, I Shrunk The Kids! or experiments with nonce verbs; see Bybee &
Slobin (1982).
5 The only clear-cut case of a product-oriented schema, albeit with a very limited application, is
the ending -og in Swedish strong verbs, where the verb dö–dog ‘die’ has analogically acquired the
ending from verbs that originally had it, like slå–slog ‘hit’, dra–drog ‘drag’.
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Hare, Mary & Jeffrey L. Elman. 1995. Learning and morphological change. In: Cognition 56,
61–98.
Knooihuizen, Remco & Oscar Strik. 2014. Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns. In: Folia Linguistica Historica 35, 173–200.
Nowak, Jessica. 2010. On the emergence of an eighth ablaut class in German and Dutch. In:
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 22, 361–380.
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