Chapter published in:
Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Edited by Antje Dammel and Oliver Schallert
[Studies in Language Companion Series 207] 2019
► pp. 223–242

The interaction of phonological and morphological variation in Zurich German

| University of Zurich

Zurich German shows an intriguing case of variation in the inflectional paradigm of the indefinite article. This corpus-based study shows there are competing forms in the dative cell of the indefinite article. These forms can vary phonologically or morphologically depending on gender as well as syntactic factors. In this paper, a canonical approach is used to distinguish between these two different types of variation. Both shape conditioning and overabundance are briefly characterized and their co-occurrence in the same cell of an inflectional paradigm is discussed under the notion of higher order exceptionality.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data discussion
    • 2.1Phonological variation
      • 2.1.1Dative forms in NPs
      • 2.1.2Dative forms in PPs
    • 2.2Morphological variation
  • 3.Theoretical framework
    • 3.1Canonical inflectional system
    • 3.2Shape conditioning
    • 3.3Overabundance
    • 3.4Higher-order exceptionality
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.207.08has
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