Variation of noun plurals in German in Austria is investigated on the basis of adult and child language production data in different settings, with a focus on individual preferences. Results will be discussed from a psycholinguistic as well as from a sociolinguistic perspective.
Being part of non-prototypical or inherent inflection, noun plurals are known for showing high variation in many languages (e.g., Dressler 1989, Acquaviva 2004). In German, we find considerable examples of overabundance (Thornton 2011), i.e. of competition of different plural forms with no or only slightly different semantic or pragmatic meanings (e.g., Dinge vs. Dinger ‘things’, s. Mörth/Dressler 2014). Compared to standard-near varieties of German, overabundance is even stronger in German dialects (e.g., Schrödl et al. 2015 on South-Central Bavarian dialects, where up to five plural forms may coexist for some lemmas). However, certain plural forms may be more frequent in a specific setting (e.g., in an informal conversation as opposed to a formal experiment) or depend on individual preferences in language use or specific developmental trajectories in language acquisition. We examine production data from 32 children up to age 6 and their parents living in Vienna as well as from 32 adults of two different age groups living in four rural regions of Austria. Participants were largely balanced for gender and educational background (+/- high school diploma in adults, whereas for children, their parental main caregiver’s educational level was assessed). At least four data points per participant allow us an in-depth investigation of noun plurals in different settings (informal vs. formal conversation, an elicitation experiment and two translation tasks) as well as in different points in time. Results show a strong impact of individual preferences: Whereas very young children often tend towards one acquisition strategy (e.g., segmental children acquire plural suffixes first, while prosodic children start with precursors of determiners), the individual trajectories diversify, as children get older. Likewise, some rural adults show considerable differences between the settings, whereas others use largely similar production strategies throughout. Results will be discussed from a psycholinguistic as well as from a sociolinguistic perspective.
