Naturalness, Markedness and the Productivity of the Old English A-Declension

Abstract

1. Introduction and aim The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons why the Old English a-declension (1) of nouns eventually became the only productive one in the later history of the language, as is demonstrated by the present-day Standard English default plural marker -(e)s ( 2. Analogy as label According to traditional handbooks, the device through which the Old English a-declension progressively increased its lexical stock is definitely analogy, that is, its unexplained capability to attract words from the other classes, which consequently lost words as consequence of their equally unexplained weakness. 2.1. Some remarks on First of all, can be understood as paradigmatic regularization, as claimed, for instance, by Saussure, who wrote, L'analogie s'exerce en faveur de la regularite et tend unifier les procedes de formation et de flexion (1916 [1968]: 222 [Analogy acts in favour of regularity and tends to unify the processes of word formation and inflection]). In generative grammar, is the generalization of rule beyond its proper domain in the of the older generation (King 1969: 129), which reflects a universal process of that ultimately goes back to the child's acquisition of grammar (King 1969: 130), and which can have different shapes, such as restructuring, rule loss, rule generalization, and rule reordering (King 1969: 131). However, even if analogical changes are superficially based on the application of rules, it should not be ignored, as Esper remarked, that Rules are products, not of speakers, but of linguists or psycholinguists (Esper 1973: 200), in the sense that the cases in which average speakers actually formulate rules are very rare. What speakers actually do in analogical changes is to broaden the domain of application of rule to context where it has not been used before, and, as Anttila aptly suggested, represents fundamental generalization, not just mere simplification (Anttila 1977: 57). Not surprisingly, however, owing to their conception of language as an isolated system and their concentration on ideal speakers only, generativists have inevitably rejected the notion of analogy, but any theory which limits itself to the mere analysis and description of linguistic structures is unable to deal with phenomena such as analogical changes, which belong above all to everyday unguarded speech, as well as to language acquisition, slips of the tongue, etc. As King wrote, If accept the weaker interpretation of as something that merely points the direction of possible change, then becomes superfluous because is enough (King 1969: 133), and consequently we reject analogy (King 1969: 134); but while equals simplification, is not always the result of analogy. The fact is, as Leed pointed out, that To say that 'grammar is enough' is to ignore mechanisms (causes, processes, events) and deal only with results (effects, consequences, interpretations of events). It is to ignore the deeper, underlying sources of the native speaker's intuition and deal only with the surface manifestations thereof' (1970: 16-17, n. 15). This is what generative linguists have actually done; as rule, they have simply compared different stages of language, totally overlooking the dynamics of change (2) and the relevant underlying mechanisms. …