Empty morphemes in Dutch dialect atlases: Reducing morphosyntactic variation by refining emptiness typology

In the literature on Dutch morphosyntactic microvariation, it is sometimes assumed that a subpart of Dutch dialects lack certain morphemes, because they have no direct phonetic exponent. More careful analyses, however, suggest that these dialects display so-called zero morphemes, whose presence is argued for either on paradigmatic or phonological ground. In this contribution, we present some examples of such morphemes in the verbal inflection and adjectival concord systems, and develop an analysis that, by exploiting the formal mechanism relating underlying and surface phonological representat... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Edoardo Cavirani
Marc van Oostendorp
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
Reihe/Periodikum: Glossa, Vol 4, Iss 1 (2019)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Open Library of Humanities
Schlagwörter: Emptiness / Dutch dialects / Phonology / Morhosyntax / inflection / agreement / Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar / P101-410
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26627227
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.689

In the literature on Dutch morphosyntactic microvariation, it is sometimes assumed that a subpart of Dutch dialects lack certain morphemes, because they have no direct phonetic exponent. More careful analyses, however, suggest that these dialects display so-called zero morphemes, whose presence is argued for either on paradigmatic or phonological ground. In this contribution, we present some examples of such morphemes in the verbal inflection and adjectival concord systems, and develop an analysis that, by exploiting the formal mechanism relating underlying and surface phonological representations provided by Turbidity Theory, allows for the formalization of various degrees of emptiness: morphosyntactic, phonological and phonetic. This, in turn, allows for the shifting of the burden of (some instances of) microvariation from morphosyntax to PF.