Reassessing the evolution of West Germanic preterite inflection

Abstract

This article takes a quantitative approach to the long-term dynamics of the preterite inflection in West Germanic, with a special focus on Dutch. In a first step, we replicate two often-cited studies on English and German (Lieberman et al. 2007 and Carroll et al. 2012, respectively) by looking at Dutch. This part also tackles some methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. In a second step, we delve deeper into the evolution of the preterite morphology in Dutch in the last 1200 years, by looking at several factors which have been previously only investigated in isolation or on limited time slices. Using multiple binomial regression analysis, the various factors are studied under multifactorial control.