ICOME6 Abstract

Marcin Krygier
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Email: mkrygier at ifa dot amu dot edu dot pl

The emergence of semantically motivated zero plurals in Middle English

The development of nominal plural marking system in English is a topic that has received much attention for a long time. The Old English plural marking was entirely morphological and depended on the paradigmatic affiliation of a given noun. With the restructuring of the unstressed vowel set in Late Old English and its subsequent collapse into /ə/ inflectional markers were no longer able to maintain the earlier wide range of contrasts. Consequently, the Middle English period witnessed uneven competition between -es and ‑en as the two primary markers of plurality in nouns. Survivals of other endings and types of plurality marking, such as zero plurals or root-internal plurals, were relegated to the morphological fringe of the language.

So far any discussion of the process has focused on two aspects — (i) the ‑es v. ‑en competition in Middle English, and (ii) the extension of these two endings to nominal classes originally marked for plurality by other means. At the same time, the development of minor plural markers has been mostly neglected.

One of these processes is the replacement of morphological by semantic conditioning for the use of the zero plural marker, originally limited to a subset of the strong neuter nominal class. The aims of the present paper are therefore the following:

to trace the process of abandonment of the zero plural in Old English strong neuter nouns,
to identify the factors determining the selection of the [+animate] subclass of strong neuter nouns as associated with the zero plural marker, and
to follow the extension of the zero plural to other [+animate] nouns from other (Old English) nominal classes.

It is hoped that the results of this research will shed more light on the interplay of factors in the morphology-semantics interface, with particular reference to the history of English.