UC Berkeley

Over the course of the Early New High German (ENHG) period (ca. 1350–1650), the German inflectional system underwent significant restructuring. Among the affected Middle High German (MHG) inflectional classes was a class of masculine nouns traditionally labeled “weak,” defined by the presence of the ending -(e)n in all forms except the nominative singular, which usually ended in -e. In the modern language (New High German [NHG]), the nouns that once belonged to this class are spread out across at least four inflectional classes: one group of nouns (Group 1), most denoting people and large animals, has remained in the weak masculine class, while in each of three other groups (Groups 2–4), the paradigm has been rebuilt with a different part of the original weak paradigm as its base.This corpus study explores the causes of these changes through the lens of a usage-based framework, proceeding from the hypothesis that high token frequency renders word forms more resistant to analogical change, while low token frequency leaves them vulnerable to loss and replacement. It traces the diachronic paths of 37 current and former members of the weak masculine class from MHG through ENHG into NHG, measuring their token frequencies in different forms at different stages of their development. Token frequency is shown to have been the driving force behind the breakup of the class: in Groups 2, 3, and 4, the original weak forms that have been preserved and become the base of the rebuilt paradigm are, in most cases, the most frequent forms, while those that have been lost are correspondingly infrequent.