Gender and declension mismatches in West Nordic
Original version
10.1075/cilt.348.05berAbstract
There has been a diachronic tendency to align gender and declension in West
Nordic (Bjorvand 1972; Enger 2004), making it particularly interesting to consider
“mismatches” that go against this general trend. This paper addresses such cases
and discusses possible causes of the mismatches as well as the interaction between
phonological and morphological changes in their diachronic development. It appears
that the diachronic interaction of gender and declension forms complex patterns of
processes related to semantics, phonology, and morphology. The West Nordic development corroborates the view that the connection of an inflection class to some extramorphological property, for instance a semantic or phonological one, is a favoured
development (Wurzel 1989; Carstairs-McCarthy 2000).