Zur Nominalkategorie Numerus in den deutschen Mundarten Mährens und Schlesiens
On the Nominal Category Number in the German Dialects of Moravia and Silesia

Summary/Abstract: In the present paper the author deals with the description of the morphological category of number on a sample of five selected nouns in German dialects of Moravia and Silesia. These are the nouns Pferd, Sohn, Stall, Tisch and Ziege, which allow for a variety of plural variations due to their morphemic structure. In contrast, the ADT (Vol. V 2020: 79–87) presents the nouns Prügel, Schlüssel, Tisch, Fisch and Hose, which, however, are not as rich in plural forms as the group of nouns discussed in this paper. The exploration was carried out in the form of questionnaires in a total of 157 locations in the dialect area under study. The plural forms found show much more variability compared to the standard language. The distribution of plural variants indicates a certain peculiarity of three sub-areas, namely the language islands in South Moravia, Schönhengst/Hřebečsko and North Moravia. The dialectal area of Schönhengst/Hřebečsko is characterised by, among other things, consonantal subtraction (dropping of the consonant at the end of the word in the plural) in the noun Pferd, the use of diphthongs or triphthongs without a nasal at the end of the word in the noun Sohn or monophthongisation of diphthongs -ei-, -ai- in the stem syllable of the noun Tisch in plural. The South Moravian language islands are characterised by some peculiarities in the lexical plane, namely the use of the lexemes Ross and Kosa instead of Pferd and Ziege in the respective plural forms. In North Moravia, the most frequent plural variant of the noun Pferd is the plural ending with -e, while in the case of the substantive Tisch, quantitative changes in the stem vowel (shortening or lengthening) without a plural ending are relatively frequent.

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