Schwankungen bei der Flexion schwacher Maskulina im Deutschen: eine korpusgestützte Pilotstudie an der Schnittstelle zwischen Morphologie und Semantik
Variations in the flexion of weak masculine nouns in German: a corpus-based pilot study at the interface between morphology and semantics

Summary/Abstract: The use of weak masculine nouns in German challenges the established grammatical and theoretical concepts by its variation in inflection. In this paper two typically weak nouns „Mensch“ and „Bauer“ are looked at in German Referential Corpus (DeReKo) under consideration of their polysemic qualities. The focus is on whether the meaning or the source can be considered a factor for the formal variation. Qualitative and quantitative analyses from this perspective confirm earlier approaches and provide it with more nuance. All the meanings of both nouns show variation in their inflection regardless of the source. However, more dependence is noticeable between the source and the variation than between any meaning and the variation.

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