Morphology of German nouns

  The inflectional behaviour of German nouns is less complex than that of German verbs or adjectives and yet is significantly more complex than the noun inflection systems of many European languages. Bierwisch once remarked that ``the declension of [German] nouns is highly degenerate .. only the stem formation for singular and plural is of morphological interest'' (1967, 245 n19). More recently, and more positively, Clahsen et al. have noted that ``the noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes'' (1992, 225).

Broadly speaking, nouns are marked for number and case, with singular, plural and four cases being distinguished. However, the inflectional markers distinguish only a subset of the possibilities in the inflection of any given noun and no nouns in German differentiate more than four of the eight possibilities (e.g., Arm which appears as Arm, Arm-e, Arm-s, and Arm-en). Apart from two classes of nouns sometimes termed the weak nouns, which we shall discuss shortly, the nouns inflect for plural according to declensional classes, of which there are five major classes which have marked plurals and unmarked singulars (e.g., Klub, Klub-s) and six small classes which mark singular as well as plural (e.g. Alb-um, Alb-en). There is also a minor subclass which has a stem alternation other than umlaut. Whereas in the major classes the singular forms are essentially the base and citation forms of the noun in question, in the six minor classes, the base form, to which singular and plural suffixes are added can be easily identified. The citation form in these classes is the singular inflected form. The numbers of nouns in these classes is relatively small and they are largely (if not entirely) made up of words of foreign origin. However, they are sensibly treated as distinct subclasses, since their behaviour is entirely rule-governed. On the basis of the data in CELEX , the smallest minor class has 5 members and the largest minor class has 182 (the total number of German nouns listed in CELEX, Release 2, is 30490).

In addition to these declensional classes which define the plural forms, there are inflections for genitive singular forms, dependent on gender, and for dative plural forms.

Our account of the inflection of German nouns is structured as a simple inheritance hierarchy which defines the affixal and morphophonological behaviour of the nouns in each declensional class by referring to general morphophonological functions and to a network of suffix nodes.