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Double gender nouns in Croatian

Using corpus data, we present the phenomenon of double-gender and double-declension nouns in Croatian. The nouns researched here end in a consonant in the Nsg. and are attested both in the a-declension and the i-declension. Ten double-gender and double-declension nouns were selected (bol ‘pain’, čar ‘charm’, glad ‘hunger’, izrast ‘growth’, gnjilež ‘decay’, pelud ‘pollen’, splav ‘raft’, trulež ‘rot’, varoš ‘town’, živež ‘foodstuffs’). Relevant written 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 in later time periods: CLC, the Croatian Language Corpus (Ćavar and Brozović Rončević 2012) and HrWaC, the Croatian Web Corpus (Ljubešić and Klubička 2014). The study focuses on five questions: 1. Do doublets persist, or do they diachronically gradually transfer to only one form? 2. If there is a change, how long does it take for rival pattern to appears and/or disappears? 3. Is there a constant ratio between the two declensions/genders through time? 4. Is this is a case of internal or external change, i.e. can it be attributed to language contact? Results show that all ten nouns appear in both genders/declensions, but differ in the ratio between the two patterns in different time period and in different corpora. Nouns bol, glad, čar, varoš and trulež are attested in the oldest documents written in Croatian, while the others entered the Croatian language from the 2nd half of the 18th and during 19th century. Rival forms of nouns trulež, gnjilež, pelud are attested in both genders almost simultaneously, while others obtained their alternative form in different historical periods (from the 16th to the 19th century). While some nouns are rarely used in one of the patterns (1%, 4%), for some the ratio is almost equivalent (44%, 56%). 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 shows possible influence of language contact phenomena, through contact between Croatian dialects or typologically similar languages in the surroundings. Double forms do not disappear rapidly. Instead, our results speak in favour of overabundance (Thornton 2011), i.e. a more flexible approach to the blocking phenomenon or synonymy avoidance in morphology (e.g. Aronoff 1976, Carstairs-McCarthy 2010).

nominal inflection, double gender, double declension, diachrony, sinchrony, overabundance, Croatian

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