Genitive Plural as a Lexicographic Problem: the Example of Croatian Nouns of the e-Declension Ending in a Consonant Cluster

Abstract

The paper analyses dictionary descriptions of the genitive plural forms of feminine nouns of the e-declension with a stem-final consonant cluster. The analysis is based on four monolingual dictionaries of the contemporary Croatian language. In genitive plural, these nouns are overabundant and may have the formatives -ā, -ī (crkvā, crkvī ‘church’), or the formative -ā with the epenthetic ā inserted into the stem final consonant cluster (crkāvā). Based on an analysis of approximately 300 most common nouns of this type, we have shown similarities and differences within and between dictionaries in the ways the overabundant forms are attested and presented. The analysis has also shown that the dictionaries are similar in that they list variant forms relatively systematically and in a manner that is in line with the grammatical rules of standard language. This concerns both the choice of combinations of endings (the ending -ī is never given as the only ending), as well as the order of variant forms (the ending -ī is never listed as the first one). It has also been shown that the dictionaries systematically list forms in -ī for most nouns and that in the dictionaries there exists a stable core of nouns that use the formative -ā-ā. Dictionaries, however, differ in some details. This concerns, for example, the triple forms, with some dictionaries systematically citing such forms (crkāvā, crkvā, crkvī), whereas others only list the first and third forms (crkāvā, crkvī) while avoiding the second one (crkvā). The greatest dispersion in presentation is found with the ending -ā without epenthesis, which is most likely a consequence of its decreasing share in actual use with this subtype of feminine nouns. The paper also provides a comparison with the corpus data from the Riznica and hrWaC corpora (subcorpus forum.hr). This has shown that multiple forms are less commonly attested there than in the dictionaries, with the presence of the ending -ī being even more pronounced in corpora, while the core of nouns with the formative -ā-ā is somewhat reduced, but still stable.