Anglicisms and the role of -s in the German pluralisation paradigm

A common element in both English and German plural allomorphy is the suffix -s. When these two languages come into contact with one another, and English nouns are borrowed into German, the question arises whether these anglicisms are borrowed in both their singular and plural forms or whether -s is affixed to the borrowed singular forms by the application of native German morphological rules.

There are eight plural allomorphs in German, including the four suffixes -(e)n, -e, -er, -s and -Ø (i.e., a zero morpheme). Some of these may also be combined with umlaut vowel mutation (fronting of a stem vowel) to produce umlaut + -Ø, umlaut + -e and umlaut + -er. Plural marking in German is mostly determined by morpho-phonological structure, often in combination with gender. Of all the plural allomorphs in German (see Table 1 for examples), -s is the least common in terms of frequency. Bartke et al. (2005) estimate that approximately 4% of nouns in the general lexicon take this marker, whereas 47% take the most common marker, -(e)n. Despite this, -s is the most productive because it can be applied in the largest number of morpho-phonological environments. This makes it particularly useful in pluralising loanwords that do not adhere to the morpho-phonological patterns of German. Indeed, Janda (1990) indicates that loanwords form the largest category of nouns taking -s.

While the origin of the -s plural marker in German is still disputed, especially regarding its contested borrowing together with loanwords, three claims regarding its current role and position within the German morphological system have been proposed. These assertions relate to the nature of -s and its default status. However, the main difference concerns its permanence as a plural allomorph attached to individual nouns. They are: 1) that -s is temporary and is applied to newly-introduced borrowings before they become fully integrated and take on alternative plural marking (Wegener 2005); 2) in opposition to this, that the frequency of -s will expand at the expense of other plural allomorphs (Janda 1990); and 3) that -s will remain the stable default plural allomorph (Marcus et al. 1995). These claims, summarised below, inform the theoretical investigation presented in this paper.