Abstract
Inflectional doubletism is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more forms occupy the same cell in an inflectional paradigm. Slavonic languages, with their rich morphological systems, abound in examples of this phenomenon. Croatian, a South Slavonic language, does not differ in that respect. This article looks at one specific example of inflectional doubletism in Croatian: the instrumental singular of the first declension type. There are three families of masculine nouns that allow two endings in this case: nouns ending in the morpheme -ar, nouns ending in a palatal sound and nouns ending in -io. The two endings in question are -om and -em. However, even though both forms are equally possible, they are not used to the same extent. The present study first considers the actual distributions of the two endings in a corpus of Croatian. After that, it reports the results of two questionnaire studies in which sentences with the forms in question were given to native speakers to evaluate. We have carried out a quantitative analysis to determine whether the intuitions of native speakers mirror the corpus distributions of the respective forms.
Аннотация
Инфлекционный дублетизм это лингвистический феномен, в котором две или более формы охватывают одинаковую позицию в инфлекционной парадигме. Славянские языки, с их богатой морфологической системой, изобилуют примерами этого феномена. Хорватский язык как южно-славянский язык в этом аспекте не является исключением. В данном исследовании рассматривается один особый случай инфлекционного дублетизма хорватского языка, а именно первый тип наклонения инструментального падежа единственного числа. Существует три группы существительных мужского рода, которые в этом падеже имеют два окончания: существительные с окончанием морфемой -ar, существительные с палатальным звуком и существительные с окончанием -io. Рассматриваемые окончания—это -om и -em. Однако, несмотря на то, что обе формы могут использоваться равноправно, они употребляются не в одинаковой степени. В данном исследовании сперва анализируется фактическое распределение этих двух окончаний в корпусе текстов хорватского языка. Далее предлагаются результаты двух анкет, в которых носители хорватского языка оценили предложения с рассматриваемыми формами. Мы провели количественный анализ с целью выяснения следующего вопроса: отражает ли интуитивное оценивание носителей языка распределение соответствующих форм в корпусе.
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Notes
This principle would therefore exclude simple nouns, such as dar ‘present’, papar ‘pepper’, požar ‘fire’ etc. as well as nouns in -ar borrowed as a unit, such as žandar (< French), bećar (< Turkish), sekretar (< Latin). This latter group cannot be separated into the stem (žand-, beć-, sekret-) and ending as is the case for the other -ar nouns.
The same subclass of nouns exhibits doubletism in the vocative singular as well, where both -u and -e are found.
The English word ‘sanctioned’ can have two opposing meanings; it can either mean that something is authorised or approved by someone, but it can also mean that something is penalised or banned. We use ‘sanctioned / non-sanctioned’ here in the former meaning so as to avoid the use of the often criticised dichotomy ‘grammatical / ungrammatical’.
We came across a couple of similar examples in other families as well of proper nouns of foreign origin which retained their original spelling and pronunciation. They showed the greatest amount of variation, e.g. surnames in -tz /c/, -ts /tʃ/, Hungarian names in -s (pronounced as /ʃ/) etc.
The reader might ask why this number was chosen as the border point between B2 and B3. If we look at Table 1, we can see that the ratio of the token frequency of the two endings is around 5:1, so this seems a natural boundary in this instance.
Ethical approval for this research was obtained by the University of Sheffield’s Research Ethics Committee.
We should explain the term ‘estimated marginal means’ that appears in Figs. , , and . An ANOVA analysis in SPSS will output these means (also called ‘unweighted means’), which are used when comparing samples of unequal sizes as ANOVAs are sensitive to sample size and missing answers. We will not go into how they are calculated, but it is useful to keep in mind that they do not necessarily correspond to the mean values we refer to, but they also should not differ by much.
Unless, of course, the rating scale is designed in such a way that they should add up to 100, as was the case in Bresnan (2007).
The final versions of the questionnaires, after the filler material had been added, contained 48 sentence pairs each.
Fehringer (2004) observed gang effects at work in the formation of Dutch adjectives; however, her results fail to show similar effects in German genitive formation.
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Lečić, D. Morphological doublets in Croatian: the case of the instrumental singular. Russ Linguist 39, 375–393 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9152-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9152-7