Claus Lambertsen

The Danish Noun Plural Landscape

This article examines the Danish noun plural system in spoken language, i.e. we depart from a – radically new – sound perspective. We consider suffixes for which the categorization is not isomorphic with the orthographically determined categories. We give an overview of phonological stem changes, and we find interesting patterns of stød change in monosyllables. We identify 23 different combinations of suffixation and stem change, and give lexical frequencies for them. We consider two aspects of plural formation that are relevant for the investigation of first-language acquisition, that is, the gradation of stem change and the predictability of plural suffixes from gender and from stem-final phonology; we detect four classes of stem-final phonemes, i.e. segment types, which have different patterns of plural suffixation, and we point to some reasons why just these distinctions – mainly in sonority – can be relevant.