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- Title
Morphological Change Through Phonological Analogy: 2nd Person Singular - s → - st and Related Developments in Germanic.
- Authors
Fertig, David
- Abstract
Almost all existing accounts of the change of the 2nd person singular verbal agreement ending - s to - st in Old English and Old High German attribute the development to some combination of reanalysis of forms with enclitic subject pronouns ending in - stu and analogy based on a handful of mainly preterite-present verbs that already had 2nd person singular - st in the present indicative in Proto-(West)-Germanic. These factors retain a role in the analysis presented here, but I argue that the operative mechanisms are essentially phonological in nature, licensed ultimately by certain neutralizing processes such as degemination, rather than involving the spread of an existing - st morpheme, grammaticalization of an enclitic subject pronoun, or relocation of a morphological boundary. This analysis also sheds light on the relationship of the 2nd person singular change to the more general phenomenon of word-final t accretion seen in dozens of words such as German Axt 'ax' < Middle High German ackes or English against < earlier agains.*
- Subjects
OLD High German language; GRAMMATICALIZATION; MORPHEMICS; NEUTRALIZATION (Linguistics); ENGLISH language
- Publication
Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 2019, Vol 31, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1470-5427
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S147054271800003X