Abstract
The aim of this paper is to make sense of the typologically quite exceptional pattern of person neutralization in the plural as we find it in Dutch verbal paradigms. We argue that Dutch, and most of its dialects, have a structural pattern of syncretism in their verbal paradigm: there are no person-distinctions in the plural. The main question of this paper is: where does this structural pattern of neutralization in Dutch come from, if we cannot explain it as a typologically wellattested pattern? As a first step, note that although the pattern is typologically quite odd, it conforms to another well-known generalization about paradigms: neutralization occurs in the marked half of the paradigm (see e.g. Nevins 2009). Further, we need to explain why this pattern occurs precisely in the Netherlands at this particular point in time. To this, we argue that this pattern arises as the result of a particular language acquisition strategy together with reduced evidence from the input for the fully inflected forms, probably as a result of dialect contact. This reduced evidence causes the third person, being the most frequent form, to dominate the other plural forms. In combination with limited paradigm splitting (Pinker, 1996), this explains the uniform plural that we find in most Dutch dialects.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aalberse, S. (2009). Inflectional economy and politeness. Morphology-internal and morphology-external factors in the loss of second person marking in Dutch. Utrecht, LOT-dissertation series
Aalberse S., Don J. (2009) Syncretism in Dutch dialects. Morphology 19(1): 3–12
Aikhenvald A., Dixon R.M. (1998) Dependencies between Grammatical Systems. Language 74(1): 56–80
Baerman M., Brown D., Corbett G. (2005) The syntax–morphology interface. A study of syncretism (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Barbiers, S. et al. (2006). Dynamische syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten. Amsterdam, Meertens Instituut. http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/sand.
Bennis H., MacLean A. (2006) Variation in verbal inflection in Dutch dialects. Morphology 16(2): 291–312
Bittner, D., & Dressler, W. (2003). Development of verb inflection in first language acquisition: A crosslinguistic perspective (Studies on Language Acquisition). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Blansitt E. (1975) Progressive aspect. Working Papers on Language Universals 18: 1–35
Blom, E., Polišenská D., & Weerman, F. (2007). Effects of age on the acquisition of agreement inflection. Morphology, 16, 313–336.
Bobaljik J. (2008) Missing persons: A case study in morphological universals. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2): 203–230
Brown R. (1973) A first language. The early stages. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. (Typological Studies in Language). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cinque G. (1999) Adverbs and functional heads. A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford
Corbett, G. (2000). Number. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coveney A. (2000) Vestiges of Nous and the 1st person plural verb in informal spoken French. Language Sciences 22(4): 447–481
Cysouw M. (2003) The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford University Press, Oxford
De Hoop H., Haverkort M., van der Noort M. (2004) Variation in form versus variation in meaning. Lingua 114(9–10): 1071–1089
Goeman-Taeldeman-Van Reenen Project 1980–1995. (2001) Dataset http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/gtrp. Amersterdam: Meertens Instituut.
Goeman A. (1999) T-deletie in Nederlandse dialecten. Kwantitatieve analyse van structurele, ruimtelijke en temporele variatie. Holland Academic Graphics, Den Haag
Greenberg J. (1966) Language universals with special reference to feature hierarchies. Mouton, The Hague
Halle, M. (1997). Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission. In B. Bruening, Y. Kang, & M. McGinnis (Eds.), Papers at the Interface (pp. 425–449). (MIT Working papers in Linguistics 30). Cambridge: MITWPL.
Halle M., Marantz A. (1993) Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In: Hale K., Keyser S.J. (eds) The view from building 20. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 111–176
Harley H., Ritter E. (2002) Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78(3): 482–526
Hyltenstam K., Abrahamsson N. (2003) Maturational constraints in SLA. In: Doughty C.J., Long M.H. (eds) Handbook of second language acquisition. Blackwell, Malden MA, pp 539–599
Johnson J.S., Newport E.L. (1991) Critical period effects on universal properties of language: The status of subjacency in the acquisition of a second language. Cognition 39(3): 215–258
Julien M. (2000) The syntactic representation of tense. Proceedings of ConSOLE 8: 171–186
Julien, M. (2002). Syntactic heads and word formation. (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kerstens J.G. (1993) The syntax of number, person and gender: A theory of phi-features. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
Kroch A., Taylor A. (1997) Verb movement in old and middle english: Dialect variation and language Contact. In: Kemenade A., Vincent N. (eds) Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 297–325
Laaha S., Gilles S. (2007) Typological perspectives on the acquisition of noun and verb morphology. University of Antwerp, Antwerp
Leonard L., Caselli C., Devescovi A. (2002) Italian children’s use of verb and noun morphology during the preschool years. First Language 22(3): 287–304
Lynch J. (2000) A grammar of anejom. Australian National University, Canberra
Nevins, A. (2009). Marked triggers vs. marked targets and impoverishment of the dual. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~nevins/publications.html.
Noyer, R. (1992). Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. PhD thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Pinker S. (1996) Language learnability and language development. With new commentary by the author. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Polišenská, D. (2010). Dutch children’s acquisition of verbal and adjectival inflection. Utrecht: LOT-dissertation series.
Rice, K. (2000). Morpheme order and semantic scope. Word formation in the Athapaskan verb. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slobin, D. (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition: The data (Vol 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Trommer, J. (2005). Distributed optimality. Diss. University of Potsdam. http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~jtrommer/papers/papers.html.
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. (Language in Society 10). Oxford: Blackwell. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2005/101/.
Weerman F. (1993) The diachronic consequences of first and second language acquisition: The change from OV to VO. Linguistics 31(5): 903–931
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editors of the volume, Andrew Nevins, Uli Sauerland, Jonathan Bobaljik for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank Jochen Trommer for his encouraging e-mails and remarks. Also, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their criticism and help. We thank Marc van Oostendorp for providing the most recent raw data of the Morphological Atlas of Dutch dialects.
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Aalberse, S., Don, J. Person and number syncretisms in Dutch. Morphology 21, 327–350 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-010-9164-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-010-9164-3