Heide Wegener

• The paper takes the plural markers of German as an example for discussing the question of unidirectionality in grammaticalization. Contrary to the general as-sumption that grammatical markers develop from lexical items with independent meaning into affixes with grammatical function, none of the German plural mar-kers has its origin in a separate lexeme. On the contrary, the suffixes -e, -en, and -er had highly grammatical functions as stem building suffixes without any semantic meaning. -s originates in the genitive case marker, a more grammatical relation than the semantically more concrete category of number. The umlaut is originally a pu-rely phonologically conditioned vowel alternation resulting from a vowel harmony rule. The schwa suffixes and the umlaut became functional 'junk' and were then reanalysed as plural markers, now leading a second life in this function. Thus, um-laut and affixes did not lose but obtained semantic substance and hence seem to contradict the theory. But taking into account that stem suffixes wereThe paper takes the plural markers of German as an example for discussing the question of unidirectionality in grammaticalization. Contrary to the general as-sumption that grammatical markers develop from lexical items with independent meaning into affixes with grammatical function, none of the German plural mar-kers has its origin in a separate lexeme. On the contrary, the suffixes -e, -en, and -er had highly grammatical functions as stem building suffixes without any semantic meaning. -s originates in the genitive case marker, a more grammatical relation than the semantically more concrete category of number. The umlaut is originally a pu-rely phonologically conditioned vowel alternation resulting from a vowel harmony rule. The schwa suffixes and the umlaut became functional 'junk' and were then reanalysed as plural markers, now leading a second life in this function. Thus, um-laut and affixes did not lose but obtained semantic substance and hence seem to contradict the theory. But taking into account that stem suffixes were derivative formants in Indo-European, the development can be shown to proceed in two steps involving first semantic bleaching, then semantic strengthening. Hence, the German plural markers turn out to be cases of secondary grammaticalization or re-grammaticalization.…