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Article published In:
NOWELE
Vol. 76:2 (2023) ► pp.153–202

End-weight at its most dynamic

Prosodic prominence as a factor promoting morphophonological marking

ORCID logo | University of Bamberg
| University of Paderborn

This contribution supports and extends the principle of end-weight, first formulated by Quirk et al. (1972) to describe the tendency of heavy constituents to appear late in a sentence. Developing this principle further, we argue that it favours the addition of (functionally non-neutral) morphological markers to sentence-final constituents, which are typically characterized by prosodic prominence. The markers we study are undergoing diachronic establishment or loss and are thus temporarily variable. They represent rather diverse categories in different West Germanic languages and varieties (English, Northern Low German, Frisian) and have been gathered from different periods. Examples include inflectional endings of nouns, adjectives, finite verbs and infinitives, pro-form uses of possessives and the adjective other, prepositional choices, the a-prefix and periphrastic doon ‘do’. We suggest that end-weight is scalar, with absolute sentence-final position producing the strongest effects.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Database
  • 4.Case studies
    • 4.1Long and short versions of prepositions in early Middle English
    • 4.2Loss of the dative inflection in infinitives in Middle English
    • 4.3Spread of the -s-suffix in possessive pro-forms in Middle English
    • 4.4Establishment of plural -s in the pro-form other in Early Modern English
    • 4.5Loss of a-prefixing in -ing-forms since Early Modern English
  • 5.Further parallel cases
    • 5.1Data-based close parallels in Northern Low German and Saterland Frisian
      • 5.1.1Short and long forms of adverbs in Northern Low German
      • 5.1.2Inflected infinitives in Northern Low German
      • 5.1.3Short and long forms of prepositions in Northern Low German
      • 5.1.4The contrast between inflected and uninflected past tense forms in Saterland Frisian
    • 5.2Shorter treatments of additional parallels in West Frisian and Northern Low German
      • 5.2.1Superlatives with or without final schwa in West Frisian
      • 5.2.2An incoming emphasizer in West Frisian
      • 5.2.3The alternation between short and long feminine nouns in Low German
      • 5.2.4The ongoing extension in Low German of oblique -n-forms in nominative environments
      • 5.2.5The adverb ganz ‘very/quite’ copying the ending -en of adjectives in Low German
      • 5.2.6 Doon-support in Low German
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Summary and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00078.sch
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