DIACHRONIC EXPLANATION FOR SYNCHRONIC IRREGULARITIES OF GOTHIC NOMINAL DECLENSION

초록

This paper aims to investigate the synchronic irregularities of Gothic nominal declension and find out the factors to cause these irregular forms from a diachronic point of view. Gothic generally shows the regular nominal declension according to number and case, but there are some lists of nouns with the irregular declension deviated from the normal, which are largely divided into two subtypes, the ambiguous and the mixed. Until now, most previous studies about them have attributed these irregularities to their own lexical properties. However, a close inspection of these synchronic irregulars, on the one hand, proves that they are not individually independent phenomena but instead, closely related to each other, and on the other hand, they are the resultants of diachronic changes to have happened in the previous stage. It is also observed that there are various linguistic factors influencing on the change of Gothic nominal declension, and these factors operate very systematically in close relation to each other.

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