s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

22
Elżbieta Adamczyk
Old High German forms which display some synchronic alternation between
the archaic and innovative inflection. Finally, beyond the continuum extends the
Old High German pattern of plural inflection, which, quite unexpectedly,
gradually expands and becomes productive.
Crucial for an adequate interpretation of the restructuring process in Germanic
s-stems was the extension of the e-grade (pertaining originally to the
oblique cases exclusively) to the nominative/accusative sg., characterized by the
o-grade, whereby the shape of these two cases became identical with that of the
i- and a-stems. This development must have shattered the stability of the s-stem
inflection very early, which opened the way to subsequent reshaping of the s-stem
paradigm on the pattern of the more influential inflectional types. In effect, the
class of s-stems began to shrink dramatically at a very early stage, i.e., prehistorically,
as its members drifted away to the i-stem or to the a-stem declensions.
As far as the mechanism behind the process of morphological restructuring
is concerned, it must be emphasized that in Old English the process involved
a gradual restriction of the forms containing the r-stem formative to the plural
and an accompanying elimination of the umlauted forms in the singular. These
two developments were followed by a total eradication of the original stem
formative from the plural – a process whose absence from Old High German
was decisive for the future shape of the s-stem inflection in German.
In Old High German, where the -ir- formative was reinterpreted as a plural
marker, not only was this declensional type better preserved, but it also became
a productive plural pattern, spreading to nouns of various etymological backgrounds.
As could be inferred from the data presented above, it is the Old High
German period that testifies to the initial stage of this spread, where synchronic
alternation can be found in a number of frequent nouns which otherwise declined
regularly as the a-stems. In contrast to Old High German, the -r-formative
was probably never recognized as a plural marker in Old English; instead all
nouns of this class eventually joined the major inflectional pattern characterized
by the sibilant plural marker (Kastovsky 1985: 102). In order to account for the
discrepant development of the original s-stem declension in English and German,
and in particular for the fact that the r-stem formative was never generalized
in English, the overall condition of the Old English nominal system needs
to be invoked, which, as a result of a complex interplay of phonological and
morphological factors, lost its original declensional diversity. The predominance
and rapid spread of one inflectional type in Old English (the a-stem pattern)
has been associated with a typological shift (well evinced in the a-stem
declension), whereby the inherited stem-based inflection lost its ground in favour
of word-based inflection (Kastovsky 1995: 233; 1997: 67). The newly
emerging “monoparadigmatic, stem-invariant and word-based” inflection left
consequently no chance for the extension of -r- as a plural marker in Old Eng-