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Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015
Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 348] 2019
► pp. 97–114

Chapter 5
Gender and declension mismatches in West Nordic

There has been a diachronic tendency to align gender and declension in West Nordic (Bjorvand 1972; Enger 2004), making it particularly interesting to consider “mismatches” that go against this general trend. This paper addresses such cases and discusses possible causes of the mismatches as well as the interaction between phonological and morphological changes in their diachronic development. It appears that the diachronic interaction of gender and declension forms complex patterns of processes related to semantics, phonology, and morphology. The West Nordic development corroborates the view that the connection of an inflection class to some extramorphological property, for instance a semantic or phonological one, is a favoured development (Wurzel 1989; Carstairs-McCarthy 2000).
Keywords: gender, inflection class, morphology, Norwegian, Icelandic, Old Norse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Inflection classes
    • 1.2West Nordic declensions
  • 2.Old Norse strong feminines
    • 2.1Gender and declension change
    • 2.2Feminine ijō-stems
    • 2.3Male and female variants of proper names
  • 3.Plural endings
    • 3.1Masculine and feminine gender-declensions
    • 3.2Neuters
    • 3.3Weak feminines
    • 3.4A weak macroclass
  • 4.Factors at work
    • 4.1Alignment of gender and declension
    • 4.2Semantic cohesion
    • 4.3The importance of phonological form
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.348.05ber
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