Re: Pluralis på svensk och tysk (was: Re: Performative verbs (was: Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at)

Douglas Koller, Latin & French scripsit:

> Okay, so it ain't paradise and the word "rule" may be a tad strong,
It's a matter of using "rule" differently in different contexts.
There certainly are rules for German (and Swedish) that can be taught
to L2 learners, but they aren't the kind of rules that can possibly
be inside L1 speakers' heads to allow them to generate their language
correctly.  Each German noun just has to be stored along with its plural,
and that's that.

Research shows that when you offer germanophones novel nouns to make
plural, they would much rather apply -s to them than apply any of the
eight other German plural affixes.  This effect is stronger if the
word doesn't look like anything already in German, but applies even
to words that rhyme with or otherwise closely resemble irregulars,
and even to words that are applied in headless or rootless ways (e.g.
the plural of Mann is M)Bänner, but when it's a proper name, the plural
is Manns).  What this shows is that rule-regularity isn't the same thing
as statistical regularity, since statistically -s is far and away the
rarest plural affix.

(Note that derivational suffixes are effectively heads, and consequently
the fact that all German words, novel or not, with a given derivational
suffix have the same plural affix, does not count against this view.)

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