The subsegmental structure of German plural allomorphy

Abstract

Plurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of arbitrary lexical classes and virtually exceptionless generalizations across them. Thus while it is not fully predictable phonologically or semantically which suffix allomorph a plural noun takes and whether it undergoes umlaut (vowel fronting), specific suffixes consistently trigger or block umlaut (Augst 1979; Wurzel 1998; Wunderlich 1999), and all plural forms obey a fixed prosodic template (Wiese 1996b, 2009). This combination of regular and irregular has given rise to the claim that German noun plurals defy a morpheme-based analysis and require global paradigm structure conditions (Bittner 1991; Wurzel 1998; Carstairs-McCarthy 2008) or construction-specific constraints (Neef 1998; Wunderlich 1999; Wiese 2009). In this paper, I present a new, purely concatenative analysis of German plurals combining and extending on elements of the classical autosegmental analyses for German umlaut (Yu 1992; Lieber 1992; Féry 1994) and schwa (Hall 1992; Noske 1993; Wiese 1996b) couched in Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2015; Bermúdez-Otero 2018) and Containment Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993; Revithiadou 2007; van Oostendorp 2008). I show that assuming a general plural suffix consisting of a featurally underspecified segmental root node and a floating Coronal feature allows for a purely phonological explanation of both paradigmatic implications and the templatic shape of noun plurals, which have so far been treated as independent problems, and gives rise to a principled account of apparent exceptions.