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Magnus Breder Birkenes: SubtraktiveNominalmorphologie im Westmitteldeutschen?

This article is concerned with the apparently subtractive plural and dative forms in many West Middle German dialects, e.g., dɔ:g – dɔ: ‘day, days’ or hand9 – hɛn ‘hand, hands’. Drawing on the fact that the occurrence of such forms in contemporary dialects is unpredictable, the hypothesis is raised that we are dealing with historically far-reaching phonological processes (cf. Holsinger / Houseman 1999). An attempt is made to prove this assumption based on dialectal data from linguistic atlases and detailed dialect descriptions. Within the framework of Bybee’s(1985) network model a synchronic analysis is then undertaken. It is seen that the subtractive plurals and datives form a relatively closed class, the members of which admittedly are all very common. For the subtractive plurals at least, it can be assumed that the plural forms are now the base ones, while the singular forms are weakly suppletive. There is thus a parallel to the adjectival inflexion of French (cf. Dressler 2000). The analysis presented here differs from relatively recent work on this topic (Wurzel 1984 andGolston / Wiese 1996) in which an attempt is made to derive the subtractive forms from existing synchronic rules or principles of well-formedness.