PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In German, differences between the declension of words belonging to the peripheral nominal domain (mainly proper names, abbreviations, and loan words) and that of more prototypical nouns can be observed. This can be explained by the competition of two motivations, which are weighted differently depending on the nature of the noun in question: the overt expression of morphosyntactic properties vs. ‘morphological schema constancy’, which is more important for peripheral nouns. The notion ‘morphological schema constancy’ refers to word form stability through the avoidance of inflectional elements that strongly affect the shape of a word (e.g. Taxi-s vs. Tax-en ‘taxis‘, or umlaut), or the avoidance of inflectional elements at all (d-es Barock-Ø vs. d-es Barock-s ‘the-GEN.SG Baroque-GEN.SG’). In the present study, we report the results of a self-paced reading task, in which we compared reading times of inflected (des Barock-s) vs. non-inflected nouns (des Barock-Ø) within a genitive phrase. Since the non-inflected variants evoke significantly shorter processing times, our findings indicate that ‘morphological schema constancy’ leads to a facilitation of word recognition of peripheral nouns; thus they support the idea that ‘schema constancy’ is a functional principle that plays an important role in determining morphological variation.