Morphologicality versus Morpholexicality in Umlaut Morphologization: A Corpus Study of German Verb Forms

Abstract

Umlaut might be morphologized as morphologically or morpholexically conditioned in Germanic languages, depending on whether it is reassociated with a morphological category in general or becomes fossilized in the paradigm cells of specific lexemes. The study focuses on the morphologization of a ∼ e Umlaut among German verb forms, and conducts a quantitative study of Old High German, Middle High German, and Early Modern High German corpora. I first use an entropy-based method to evaluate phonologicality, morphologicality and morpholexicality in the distribution of a ∼ e as the stem vowel and later investigate the mutual influence between Umlaut and the a ∼ e distribution in the main inflectional categories. The results suggest that Umlaut is morphologized in different directions across different categories, depending on the proportion of forms subject to Umlaut in each category.