Jessica Nowak. 2015. Zur Legitimation einer 8. Ablautreihe. Eine kontrastive Analyse zu ihrer Entstehung im Deutschen, Niederländischen und Luxemburgischen (Germanistische Linguistik – Monographien 30). Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms. x, 415 S.
2016; De Gruyter; Volume: 8; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1515/zrs-2016-0030
ISSN1867-1705
Autores Tópico(s)Lexicography and Language Studies
ResumoThe past several years have seen something of a revival of interest in the verbal inflection of the Germanic languages.While the 'great past tense debate' of the 1990s was focused for the most part on the English language and synchronic psycholinguistic approaches, recent publications have shed more light on the history of strong and weak verbs in German, Dutch, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages (see among others Dammel 2011).Building upon her earlier articles (e. g.Nowak 2010) this new book by Jessica Nowak is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature.The central topic of the book is the titular "eighth ablaut class" (henceforth S8), a term that refers to a few interrelated but slightly different phenomena in the three languages under scrutiny.In Dutch and German, it is used to describe the generalized ablaut pattern x-o-o, which is mainly represented by the patterns e-o-o and i-o-o (e. g.Dutch zenden-zond-gezonden). 1 The origins of this pattern lie in the Early Modern period, where the contrast between the singular and plural past tense vowels was neutralised.The change of the third ablaut class pattern from the earlier e/i-a-o-o to e/i-o-o is a significant one, as the shift from an overarching ABC(C) type to ABB may be seen as kind of partial regularisation that still maintains the hallmarks of strong inflection-note that weak verbs are also of the ABB type.As Nowak convincingly argues, for some verbs in Early Modern Dutch and Early Modern High German the x-o-o pattern forms an alternative to wholesale 'weakening', i. e. a shift to weak inflection.This illustrates how in these languages, irregular and regular are not discrete polar opposites; rather, there is a cline ranging from complete suppletion on the one end to only suffixation on the other. 2
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