Phonemic structure of the root morpheme in the Gothic language (a complex quantitative analysis of lexicographic sources)

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of the phonemic structure of the root morpheme in Gothic. Using a systematic sampling procedure, the words from a Gothic dictionary were selected to form the register with 382 root morphemes. The study employed a quantitative research with statistical data analysis to
investigate such characteristics of the Gothic root morpheme as its length in phonemes, distribution, combinability and phonotactics of vowel and consonant phonemes within CV root patterns, their constructive potential and symmetry. The investigation has revealed several fundamental regularities that characterize the Gothic root morpheme organizing on the phonemic level. The results of the study have shown that the Gothic language has roots ranging in length from two to nine phonemes, but four-fifths of the analyzed roots consisted of 3-4 phonemes, the average length of the Gothic root in phonemes is 3.55, the multi-phoneme roots are rare and represented mainly by lexical items of non-Germanic origin. The analysis of the realized canonical forms has shown that the Gothic language system uses only 2% of the theoretically possible forms for the construction of root morphemes at the phonemic level. The vast majority of these roots function as dependent roots, only 5% of them function as independent roots that form complete lexical units. The canonical forms of roots in the Gothic language have different modeling power; the most productive among them are three structural types (CVC, CVCC, CCVC), which form almost four fifths of all roots in the studied array. The phonemic structure of the root morpheme is characterized by a significant consonantal saturation: the initial and final components of most canonical forms are formed by consonants, and the medial ones by vowels. Structures of this type describe almost 90% of the total number of roots in the study sample. It has been proven that the phonemic structure of Gothic roots is characterized by symmetry, with the symmetrically constructed roots being mostly characterized by the mirror type of symmetry.