German noun inflection

  The literature on German noun inflection is large and includes such milestones as Wurzel (1970), Lieber (1981), and Wurzel (1984). A systematic review that did justice to the relevant literature of the last thirty years would be at least as long as the present document. For the most part, we restrict our attention below to work on German noun inflection in the inheritance/realizational tradition published in the decade that began with Carstairs (1987). Much of the recent published work on German noun inflection has focussed on the phonological and morphophonological issues that arise in an analysis, rather than on the inflectional system per se. There is a good deal of discussion of the nature of umlaut and this will be considered in relation to our own approach in the section on umlaut. Another issue which has attracted attention in the literature is the role of schwa in the inflection of German. Although we provide formal accounts of final consonant devoicing, schwa and umlaut, they are not the focus of the present enterprise. We have no choice but to provide analyses since we are engaged in giving a fully explicit, fully axiomatised theory of German noun inflection. But their status is essentially modular - given an alternative, but descriptively equivalent, theory of the phonology of umlaut, say, it ought to be possible to use it to replace the one we give without any significant consequences for the rest of our analysis.

The work on German nouns which perhaps most closely resembles that described here is that by Doris Bleiching . Bleiching (1992, 1994) provides accounts of German noun and verb inflection in a framework which is broadly similar to ours, although she concentrates on stress in compound nouns and does not provide a full account of the non-affixal alternations. Also very closely related is the analysis of German noun inflection given by Reinhard (1990), Reinhard & Gibbon (1991) and Gibbon (1992) which concentrates on umlaut. In common with this Bielefeld work, we make pervasive use of syllable addresses to specify phonological structure, and we allow such addresses to be extended with morphosyntactic attributes (as in Dafydd Gibbon 's use of <orth peak vowel plural> (1992, 48)).