106
Here it is still open which categories will serve to categorise stem forms (as
indicated by the dots). They will be identified in Section 5.10 11
a word-paradigm (of
sp re ch e n
w)
a stem-paradigm (of SPRECHL)
[ (spreche, | IP, Sg, Ind, Pres, Act) >,
( (sprech,
>,
(sprichst. {2P, Sg, Ind, Pres, Act) >,
(sprich.
),
(spricht. )3P, Sg, Ind, Pres, Act) >.
(sproch.
>,
(sprechen, ( IP. PI, Ind, Pres, Act) >.
(sprach,
...
),
}
(spräch,
...
>
sets of
morpho-
sets of
units
syntactic
logical
morphological
categories
units
categories
What are (in traditional terminology) strong verbs’ tense stems are thus con-
strued as forms
of stems. Of course, traditional terms may be used wherever
this seems convenient; however, I shall put them in single quotation marks as
in: 'past stem’; that is, ‘past stem’
is short for past tense stem form.
Stem
forms that occur in principal parts (thus ‘primary tense stems’) will be referred
to as primary forms
(of stem lexemes); e.g., sprech, sprach, sproch
are the
primary forms of
SPRECHL.
Likewise I shall use secondary form
to refer to
stem forms that are, in traditional terms, ‘secondary stems’; e.g., sprich
and
spräch
are the secondary forms of
SPRECHL.
Primary present forms will be
referred to as base forms
(or bases,
for short); other primary forms may be
referred to as ablaut forms.
Thus sprech
is the base of
SPRECHL
and sproch
and sprach
are the ablaut forms of
SPRECHL."
All morphological items that will be assumed are surface entities, and
morphological categories will be based on surface entities: the treatment of
ablaut to be proposed will be couched in a surface morphology that does not
10 Cf. also Eisenberg (1998: 213). For Lieb’s explication of the concept of paradigm see
Lieb (1975, 1980), and in particular Lieb (1992). Cf. also Zwicky’s notion of form list
(Zwicky 1990: 218). Stems are assigned a major role also in Anderson (1992), Aronoff
(1994), Stump (2001), and Blevins (2003). Anderson’s distinction between stem sets and
stems may be compared to Lieb’s distinction between stem-paradigms and stem forms.
11 (An alternative terminology has major/minor instead of primary/secondary, cf. Halle
1953: 46). Base forms o f stems must not be confused with morphological base forms
(morphs)', morphological units, including forms of stems, are conceived as sequences of
morphs (Lieb 1983: 157). For convenience, in the present paper, morphological and syntac-
tic units are referred to by orthographic names in lowercase letters (thus sprech for
{(1, sprech)), versprech for {< 1, ver), (2, sprech)) etc.).
107
countenance ‘underlying’ forms (and hence no rules which turn underlying
forms into surface forms).12
2
Forms of ablaut
2.1 Vowel alternations
In synchronic treatments, descriptions of ablaut in terms of gradations (ablaut
patterns) often differ from those of umlaut in two ways: first, the determination
of what umlaut is (‘fronting’) remains independent of considerations of par-
ticular uses that umlaut is put to (e.g., plural marker); on the other hand, set-
ting up ablaut patterns involves reference to the particular functions of stem
forms; for instance, a certain gradation may be specified as (Curme 1922:
304):
Pres, ei
Past
ie
Perf. Part, ie
1 shall not adopt this practice; rather I shall investigate the formal and func-
tional sides of ablaut separately. The present section focuses on the formal
side. Second, umlaut is conceived of as a two-place relation; on the other
hand, it is three — for older language states: four — vowels that are put into
relation in ablaut patterns. Once more I shall break with tradition. I shall argue
that ablaut in German should be treated as a two-place relation between base
forms and derived forms (or their vowels, for that matter).
In the Duden-grammar, a verb such as
f e c h t e n w
is assigned to the gra-
dation I el-h i-h i. As it happens, two out of three vowels of the principal parts
are identical. Put differently, the stem
FECHTL
has two, not three primary
forms, viz. a base in Id (fecht) and an ablaut form in h l (focht). Likewise, the
stem
MESS
l
(which belongs to gradation /e/-/a:/-/e/) has two primary forms,
viz. a base in Izl (mess) and an ablaut form in /a:/ (maß), the use of which is
— differently from the ablaut form of
FECHTL
— restricted to the past indica-
tive. Thus these two stems show two distinct two-place alternations (ld —>hl
and Id —»/a:/, respectively).
Now consider
SPRECHEN^
with the gradation /e/-/a:/-/o/ (sprech,
sprach, sproch). Gradations that comprise three different vowels might be
12 Surprisingly, underlying forms of a pseudo-historical type (as had been introduced in
early generative treatments) have been revived in a recent approach to ablaut by Segeral &
Scheer (1998). They assume, for instance, that the infinitive of the strong verb STOSSENw,
viz. /jto:ssn/, has “the synchronic structure /stAUsen/” (Segeral & Scheer 1998: 54, italics
in the original!), a form that shows a diphthong (as assumed for Common Germanic), long
o being a surface product of merging its components. This hardly calls for comment.