Allomorphy in the German genitive. A paradigmatic account

Abstract

This paper investigates the distribution of the genitive singular allomorphs -es and -s in modern standard German, in the light of current theories of the mental lexicon. It will be shown, using current electronic corpora, that the preference that native speakers demonstrate for one genitive allomorph over the other is determined by a number of interacting factors: phonological, morphological, semantic and frequency-based, and that this preference should not be seen in terms of a simple two-way opposition but is a more subtle matter of degree. Primarily, the paper will argue that: i) the choice of genitive allomorph in non-derived nouns is determined by the token frequency of that noun; ii) the choice of genitive allomorph on the head of compound words is determined by semantic transparency, so that compound heads showing a clear semantic association with the corresponding free-standing noun mirror the behaviour of that noun with respect to their genitive form (e.g. Hundes ‘dog’ – Blindenhundes ‘guide dog’). By contrast, compounds with more opaque meanings tend to act as independent items with respect to genitive allomorph allocation. It will be argued that such data provide evidence for the wholesale lexical listing of genitive forms in the lexicon, which are related to other members of their (inflectional and derivational) paradigm by lexical connections of varying strength.