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

Edoardo Cavirani,Marc Van Oostendorp

doi:10.5334/gjgl.689

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Syncretism patterns and so-called zero morphemes in the verbal paradigm of Dutch have recently attracted quite some attention
We propose a refinement/expansion of the taxonomy of emptiness in linguistic structure, which results from the combination of a representational approach to emptiness (Bendjaballah & Heiden 2008) with an optimality theoretic computational technology responsible for the phonology-phonetics mapping – Turbidity Theory (Goldrick 2001; van Oostendorp 2008)
2 Ø endings in Dutch dialects we review the main instances of zero morpheme discussed in the literature on Dutch varieties, which generally builds on data collected in the Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (SAND, Barbiers et al 2005; 2008) and to a lesser extent the Goeman-TaeldemanVan Reenen Project Database (GTRP; Goeman & Taeldeman 1996)

Summary

Introduction

Syncretism patterns and so-called zero morphemes in the verbal paradigm of Dutch have recently attracted quite some attention. We propose a refinement/expansion of the taxonomy of emptiness in linguistic structure, which results from the combination of a representational approach to emptiness (Bendjaballah & Heiden 2008) with an optimality theoretic computational technology responsible for the phonology-phonetics mapping – Turbidity Theory (Goldrick 2001; van Oostendorp 2008) This allows for the testing and the explicit formalization of the kind of emptiness we are dealing with in any individual case. The message from these data is: when accounting for (some instances of) morphosyntactic microvariation, the subtle relations holding between phonetics and phonology should be taken into close consideration, for it may reduce the amount of variation morphosyntax is burdened with The latter can be shifted to (a non-trivial version of) PF, a move which is sound with recent minimalist developments, which assume a universal syntactic component and place variation in (the interaction of this component with) the mental lexicon, PF, pragmatics, processing, memory and society (Picallo 2014).

Turbidity Theory

Verbal inflection

Affixes

Adjectival concord

Phonological emptiness is irrelevant for morphosyntax