On the motivation of genitive‑s omission in Contemporary German

In Contemporary German strong, masculine and neuter nouns in genitive phrases either take a suffix (‑s or -es) or remain uninflected for case (e.g. Nutzung d-es Internet‑s vs. Nutzung d-es Internet-Ø, ‘use of the-gen.sg internet-gen.sg/Ø’). This paper is concerned with a corpus-based description of this variation on the basis of which an explanation of the phenomenon is given. Using data taken from synchronic and diachronic corpora ( DECOW2012 and Deutsches Textarchiv) and psycholinguistic evidence from a self-paced reading task it is shown that there is a functional motivation for the fact that a well-delimited group of nouns (i.e. peripheral nouns, such as loan words, abbreviations and proper names) tend to remain uninflected for case whilst prototypical German nouns are almost always inflected for genitive case. This variation results from the competition between two motivations: syntactic agreement on the one hand and a hitherto not very well described factor called morphological schema constancy on the other hand. The latter refers to the maintenance of word form stability e.g. through the avoidance of inflectional suffixes. However, these motivations are weighted differently depending on the nature of the noun in question: Since syntactic agreement is still important for the grammatical system, prototypical nouns are unaffected by ‑s omission. Thus, in general, the genitive singular resists the general German(ic) tendency towards a reduction of nominal case markers so far.