engleski

Inflectional doublets within Croatian double- gender nouns: from a diachronic to a synchronic perspective

Recent studies on morphological doublets (overview, Naghzguy-Kohan and Kuteva 2016) have provided many examples that challenge the assumed existence of blocking effect or synonymy avoidance in language (e.g. Aronoff 1976, Carstairs-McCarthy 2010). Using corpus data, we present this issue in the nominal inflectional morphology of the Croatian language. In Croatian, in principle, there is a clear correspondence between grammatical form and gender. However, some nouns appear with two genders and two inflectional classes. Nouns that are the subject of this research end in a consonant in the N.sg. and are attested both in the a-declension (masculine gender) and in the i-declension (feminine gender). Example bol ‘pain’ 1. N bol (m) ; G bola ; D bolu ; A bol ; L bolu ; I bolom (and plural forms) 2. N bol (f) ; G boli ; D boli ; A bol ; L boli ; I bolju/boli (and plural forms) Ten double-gender and double-declension nouns were selected (bol ‘pain’, čar ‘charm’, glad ‘hunger’, trulež ‘rot’, gnjilež ‘rottenness’, živež ‘foodstuffs’, izrast ‘grow’, varoš ‘town’, pelud ‘pollen’ splav ‘raft’). Relevant historical documents from the onset of Croatian literacy were analysed to describe the one- gender stage of the noun (if possible) and to detect the appearance of the second paradigm. Two relevant corpora were used to determine the ratio between two paradigms: CLC, Croatian Language Corpus (Ćavar and Brozović Rončević 2012) and HrWaC, Croatian Web Corpus (Ljubešić and Klubička 2014). The study focuses on four questions: 1. Will the transition period end with exclusively one declension (and gender)? 2. How fast is the change, i.e. do rival pattern disappear rapidly? 3. Is there a constant ratio between the two inflection classes (and genders) through time? 4. Is this is a case of internal or external change? In most current texts, all ten nouns appear in both genders in their respective declensions but they differ in the ratio of two patterns. While some nouns are rarely used in one of the patterns (1% and 4%), for some the ratio is almost equivalent (44% vs. 56%). Ten double- gender nouns differ in their historical development. Five of them are attested in the oldest documents written in Croatian while others entered the Croatian language during the 19th century. For some nouns rival forms are attested in both genders almost simultaneously, while others obtained their alternative form in different historical periods (from 16th to 19th cent). During the time the ratio of the two patterns changed. For some nouns, there seems to be a developmental shift from one form to another (e.g. varoš ‘town’ m. decreased from 38% to 4%). The aerial distribution of the usage of the two forms show that alternative forms could be the result of language contact phenomena, whether through contact between Croatian dialects, or through contact with typologically similar languages in close proximity. Detailed analysis shows that double forms, in most cases, do not disappear rapidly. Our results rather speak in favour of overabundance (Thornton 2011) i.e. a more flexible approach to the blocking phenomenon in inflectional morphology.

morphology ; inflectional dublets ; double-geneder nouns

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