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Title: Evidentie voor -s als 'default'-meervoud in het Nederlands
Author(s): TROMMELEN, Mieke
Journal: Leuvense Bijdragen - Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology
Volume: 96    Date: 2007-2010   
Pages: 151-167
DOI: 10.2143/LB.96.0.2071286

Abstract :
With two regular plural suffixes (-en and -s), each covering a specific phonological territory, Dutch is somewhat out of tune with 'dual mechanism'-models of morphological theory. In these theories, application of a morphological default rule assigning a unique suffix ensures correct suffixation in all cases that are not lexically stored (i.e. irregular). Earlier 'dual mechanism' proposals for Dutch plural suffixes concluded that: (i) each of the two suffixes is the unique default in the reign of its own phonological territory; (ii) both are simply in complementary distribution and there exists no such thing as a default; (iii) Dutch does not have a unique default. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that on the one hand -en has characteristics typical of storage (evidence mainly from pluralia tantum), while on the other hand definite default contexts (such as loans and surnames) point towards -s as the obvious default candidate.

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