We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
VORM EN CATEGORIE.
- Authors
DON, JAN; ERKELENS, MARIAN
- Abstract
Trommelen (1989) observed that the possible phonological form of underived verbs in Dutch is much narrower than the possible phonological form that underived nouns may take. This observation seems to be some kind of 'morpheme structure condition'. In an experiment with Dutch adults that we report we find that this condition is more than just a redundancy rule that linguists can formulate but that does not have any psychological reality. We asked ourselves whether Dutch native speakers would be able to make use of this information in deciding whether a specific -nonce- word belongs to the class of verbs or nouns. In order to answer this question, and investigate the psychological reality of the morpheme structure condition, we translated Trommelen's observations into five factors that each are specific for underived nouns in Dutch: true poly-syllabicity, final long vowel, 'more than superheavy' rhyme, final schwa, final schwa + [m]. We designed two sets of nonce stems: the first set could only be classified as nouns, according to the five factors; the second set could be either nouns or verbs. The outcomes of our experiment show that Dutch adults indeed prefer the classification 'noun' for stems that were designed according these principles, while they show chance behavior on the other set of nonce stems. This implies that native speakers are sensitive to the morpheme structure condition that restricts the set of possible verbs in Dutch.
- Publication
Taal & Tongval, 2006, Vol 19, p40
- ISSN
0039-8691
- Publication type
Article