Original scientific paper
Categories of gender, number, case and declension-type of nouns in the Gospel of Matthew
Adriana Tomašić
; Zagreb
Abstract
This paper analyzes the words from the Gospel of Matthew. At the beginning the number of lemmas and tokens belonging to each part of speech are compared. In the rest of the paper only the nouns are analyzed, where proper nouns are included. There are 3519 noun tokens and 755 noun lemmas, and nouns make 21% of all tokens and 34% of all lemmas. It is expected that masculine nouns will outnumber other genders, and singular to outnumber plural and that the number of nominatives will be followed by accusative and only then by genitive. The percentage of different gender, number, case and declension-type are given. The findings are in line with analyzed categories so far. As much as 326 (43%) lemmas appear with just one token, while 429 (57%) have more than one token (up to 156). The most common nouns are Isus, Jesus; otac, father; sin, son; Gospodin, Lord and they are also among the most common ones in the Gospels of John and Luke. Matthew has nebo `heaven' and zemlja `earth' among ten of the most frequent nouns. As much as 422 (54%) appear just in one phonological shape, while the rest have 2-8 different shapes (only sin `son' has 8, duh `spirit', fruit `plod', prorok `prophet' and žena `woman' have 7). As one phonological form may be homonymic, 1405 phonological types make 1570 morphological types (e.g. word forms). Hence, phonological variation among Matthew's nouns is 0,54, morphological 0,48 and lexical 0,21 (in Luke it is 0,56/0,50/0,23, in John it is 0,57/0,51/0,16). A-declension takes 60%, E-declension 34% and I-declension 6% lemmas. Masculine gender takes 50%, feminine 36% and neuter 14% lemmas mostly due to masculine proper nouns - without them the percentage is 43 m, 40 f and 17 n lemmas (Luke has 44 m, 38 f and 18 n, while John has 49 m, 37 f and 13 n). As only 21 nouns belong to the class of pluralia tantum, 100% of lemmas are singular. Out of all lemmas 68 appeared in singular only, 17 only in plural and 15% in both singular and plural. The order of cases among tokens if following are: N 33, A 27, G 17, L 8, D 7, I 5, V 3. Most categories are similar in Luke and John, but in some John differs noticeably (e.g. there are 40% of nominatives in John vs. 33% in Matthew and 30% in Luke; 79% singular tokens in John vs. 68 in Matthew and 67 in Luke).
Keywords
The Gospel of Mathew; Croatian translation; quantitative linguistics; nouns; frequency of grammatical categories
Hrčak ID:
103739
URI
Publication date:
24.10.2012.
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