Abstract Over the past years, multifactorial corpus-based explorations of alternations in grammar have become an accepted major tool in cognitively oriented corpus linguistics. For example, prototype theory as a theory of similarity-based and inherently probabilistic linguistic categorization has received support from studies showing that alternating constructions and items often occur with probabilities influenced by prototypical formal, semantic or contextual factors. In this paper, I analyze a low-frequency alternation effect in German noun inflection in terms of prototype theory, based on strong hypotheses from the existing literature that I integrate into an established theoretical framework of usage-based probabilistic morphology, which allows us to account for similarity effects even in seemingly regular areas of the grammar. Specifically, the so-called weak masculine nouns in German, which follow an unusual pattern of case marking and often have characteristic lexical properties, sporadically occur in forms of the dominant strong masculine nouns. Using data from the nine-billion-token DECOW12A web corpus of contemporary German, I demonstrate that the probability of the alternation is influenced by the presence or absence of semantic, phonotactic, and paradigmatic features. Token frequency is also shown to have an effect on the alternation, in line with common assumptions about the relation between frequency and entrenchment. I use a version of prototype theory with weighted features and polycentric categories, but I also discuss the question of whether such corpus data can be taken as strong evidence for or against specific models of cognitive representation (prototypes vs. exemplars).

中文翻译：

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原型驱动的交替：德语弱名词的情况

摘要近年来，基于多元语料库的语法交替探索已成为面向认知的语料库语言学的主要工具。例如，原型理论作为一种基于相似性和内在概率语言分类的理论，得到了研究的支持，这些研究表明，交替出现的结构和项目经常以原型形式，语义或上下文因素的影响而发生。在本文中，我根据原型理论分析了德语名词变体的低频交替效应，这是基于现有文献中的强有力假设，我将它们整合到基于用法的概率形态学的已建立理论框架中，这使我们能够解释即使在语法上看似规则的区域也具有相似性。特别，德语中的所谓弱男性名词，遵循一种不寻常的大小写标记模式，并且通常具有特征性的词汇特性，偶尔以占优势的强男性名词形式出现。使用来自当代德国人的价值九十亿的DECOW12A网络语料库中的数据，我证明了交替出现的可能性受语义，音标和范式特征的存在与否影响。还证明了令牌频率对轮换有影响，这与关于频率和纠缠之间关系的常见假设一致。我使用具有加权特征和多中心类别的原型理论版本，但同时也讨论了这样的语料库数据是否可以作为有力证据支持或反对特定的认知表示模型（原型与模型）。