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 a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Glossa (London) 2019-07, Vol.4 (1), p.1-22
Main Authors: Cavirani, Edoardo, van Oostendorp, Marc
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agreement
Agreement (Grammatical)
Dialects
Dutch dialects
Dutch language
Emptiness
inflection
Inflection (Morphology)
Language typology
Language variation
Linguistic atlases
Linguistics
Morhosyntax
Morphemes
Morphology
Morphosyntax
Phonetic form
Phonetics
Phonology
Syncretism
Syntax
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2397-1835
2397-1835
DOI:10.5334/gjgl.689