engleski

Mixed plural paradigms of masculine nouns in Croatian

This talk deals with the subset of Croatian masculine nouns that form their plural paradigms by incorporating elements of two different plural formation strategies (hence the term mixed paradigm ; cf. Štichauer 2018). The mixing refers to the situation when some paradigm cells employ one strategy while others use another. In this talk, we present a detailed, corpus-based description of nouns with mixed plural paradigms based on the sample of about a dozen instances of mixing that were identified in a larger sample of approximately 250 polysyllabic nouns. More specifically, we aim to make sense of this phenomenon by determining whether the mixing of plural paradigms can be seen as unmotivated, i.e., as a matter of lexical choice and historical accident, or, instead, as motivated, and therefore explainable by more general tendencies and rules of Croatian grammar (see Corbett 2016 for a distinction between motivated and unmotivated paradigm splits). Our preliminary analysis suggests that the answer may be different with different nouns.

mixed paradigms ; overabundance ; Croatian ; plural formation

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