Croatian masculine nouns with competing plural paradigms: a corpus study

Competing plural paradigms found in a segment of the disyllabic and polysyllabic masculine nouns are one of the most interesting features of the Croatian noun declension system. The paper analyzes the competition between the so-called long and short plural forms of 26 masculine nouns divided into three groups: 1) disyllabic and trisyllabic nouns with a “fleeting a”; 2) disyllabic nouns with the short falling accent and a post-accentual length; 3) compounds where the second component is a monosyllabic noun. The presented data paint a picture of a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon and reveal the inconsistencies with respect to how the analyzed nouns are presented in the contemporary Croatian dictionaries. Suggestions are made as to how to make the presentation of such nouns in dictionaries more consistent with the actual usage as reflected in the present corpus findings. The data also revealed the existence of nouns that display what could be called “mixed plural paradigms”, where individual cases within the plural paradigms of such nouns diverge as to their preferences for the forms of the two competing plural paradigms (e.g., a noun may prefer the short plural for one case, and the long plural for the rest of the paradigm). Special attention is paid to the methodology in corpus research of competition in morphology, particularly to the criteria for distinguishing different gradations of competition by making use of frequency bands.