Shifting classes: Germanic strong and weak preterites and participles
Convenors: Katrien Beuls (Artificial Intelligence Lab, VUB), Bernard De Clerck (Ghent University), Dirk
Pijpops (University of Leuven), Freek Van de Velde (University of Leuven)
A conspicuous characteristic of Germanic languages is that they have two morphological strategies at their
disposal to express the preterite (‘past tense’). The oldest strategy is called the ‘strong’ inflection, and
derives from the Proto-Indo-European aspectual ablaut system (English sing ~ sang). The ‘weak’ inflection,
by contrast, is a diachronically innovative strategy in Germanic, and uses a dental suffix (English work ~
worked).
Most verbs take either the strong or the weak inflection, but the distribution is historically (as well
as socio- and dialectally) in flux: over time, many verbs have shifted from strong to weak, or – less
commonly – from weak to strong, or shift from one strong ablaut class to another, or from one weak class
to another. On the whole, a general movement (‘drift’) can be observed, of ‘weakening’, but even so, the
strong inflection is remarkably resilient, and the precise developments are notoriously complicated to
trace.
The Germanic strong and weak preterite formation has been the subject of numerous studies
which have approached the issue from different angles (philological, acquisitional, comparative …) (see,
among others, Van Haeringen 1940, De Vriendt 1965, Seebold 1970, Tops 1974, Bybee & Slobin 1982,
Bammesberger 1986, Pinker & Prince 1988, Van Coetsem 1990, Van Santen & Lalleman 1994, Hare &
Elman 1995, Van Santen 1997, Kühne 1999, Nübling 2000, Pinker & Ulman 2002, Albright & Hayes 2003,
Salverda 2006, Mailhammer 2006, 2007a,b, Nowak 2010, , Vosters 2012, Heinzle 2013, Knooihuizen & Strik
2014, Strik 2014).
Interestingly, the availability and use of large corpora – especially for English – in some of these
more recent approaches have allowed scholars to scale up the earlier findings to an unprecedented scale.
See, for instance, Lieberman et al. (2007) and Carroll et al. (2012) on the evolutionary dynamics of English
and German verbs respectively, or Anderwald (2012a,b,c) and Cuskley et al. (2014), who set out to
investigate the regularization / irregularization of English verbs working with the 400m COHA Corpus.
Second, new methods are currently being developed, which hold the potential to shed new light on the
class-shifting whims of Germanic verbs. Agent-based modelling, an in-silico simulation of languages
processes (Shoham & Layton-Brown 2009, Steels 2011), is currently being applied to Germanic strong
verbs, both in proof-of-concept stage (Pijpops et al. 2014) and in a more advanced fashion (Pugliese et al.
2014). Still, there is a significant gap between, on the one hand, the philological scrutiny of more
‘traditional’ scholars (past and present), who often work with limited datasets, but explore them in
profound detail, and, on the other hand, the bird’s-eye perspective in the more recent ‘big data’
approaches, which have access to quantitatively more robust datasets, but perhaps inevitably gloss over
many of the philological intricacies that haunt the verbal preterite morphology of Germanic. To date, the
big data approaches have, for instance, not been overly concerned with the type frequency effect of ablaut
class membership (see the critique in Carroll et al. 2012 on Lieberman et al. 2007), and often rely on a very
crude distinction between regular weak inflection (work ~ worked) and irregular verbs, i.e. all the rest,
both strong and irregular weak (think, have etc.). Additionally, the big data research tends to leave the
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comparative perspective aside, causing the results to be prone to an English bias that earlier work (such
as Van Coetsem 1990, who adduces data from West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic)
specifically seeks to avoid.
In the area of modelling, various approaches are on offer (Hare & Elman 1995, Strik 2014, Pugliese
et al. 2014), and while the overall results point in the same direction, especially with regard to the effect
of frequency, it is, as yet, unclear whether they differ in the details, and what the ramifications would be
for our understanding of the real historical processes and synchronic variation.
The time has come to bring researchers together to exchange methods and results that can help
us to bridge the gap between different approaches.
Questions that will be addressed in this workshop are:
(1) What factors (phonological proximity, frequency, prescriptivism …) play a role in the class-shift
or retention of Germanic preterites?
(2) Are these factors cross-linguistically constant? Do they manifest themselves in similar fashion
in L1 and L2 varieties? How can differences between various languages and language varieties
be motivated?
(3) How irregular are the strong verbs? The originally more transparent ablaut system gets
tousled in the course of time in the various daughter dialects of Germanic as a result of sound
changes. However, the ablauting classes are still regular to some extent, as can be seen in (i)
the fact that more coherent classes are better bolstered against weakening (Mailhammer
2007b), (ii) the fact that the ablauting classes show productivity, both in attracting new verbs,
and in applying to nonsense verbs (Knooihuizen & Strik 2014) and (iii) the fact that the
originally reduplicating seventh class has been remodelled to converge on the ablauting
classes (Van Coetsem 1990, part 2).
(4) The major drift is towards weakening of strong verbs. However, the opposite shift (weak to
strong) also occurs. How should we account for these opposing trends?
(5) Which methods are best fitted to answer which research questions and how do they tie
together? And to what extent does computational modelling need to take heed of the
meticulous philological details in classical historical grammars?
(6) To what extent is regularization subject to demographic changes? There is an increasing body
of evidence that demographic changes affect the rate of language change in dramatic ways
(see Lupyan & Dale 2010, Bentz & Winter 2013, for recent investigations). In light of this, we
would expect rates of changes in the regularization of strong verbs not to be constant through
time, but particularly more unwavering in times of stability, and more swift in times of massive
L2-influx (see also Carroll et al. 2012).
(7) What do the morphological changes in the Germanic preterite contribute to our
understanding of ‘cultural evolution of language’ (see e.g. Dediu et al. 2013)?
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