Gender and declension mismatches in West Nordic

Abstract

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).