Linking elements in compounds - LOT publications

SIMILARITY OF PLURAL ENDINGS AND LINKING ELEMENTS
Trommelen, 1993, p. 402; Haeseryn et al., 1997, p. 683; Neijt & Zuidema, 1994,
p. 69). Our study furthermore shows that the pronunciation of [(ə)n] for linking
en occurs in all regions of the Netherlands: No region was found to display a
zero percentage of n-realization.
As expected, greater n-realization was found for plural nouns than for
compounds for most of the speakers in general. This is presumably due to the
prosodic differences between the two constructions. In plural nouns, the en
occurs in word final position and thus at a phonological phrase boundary. In
compounds, the en occurs in word medial position and thus at only the
prosodic word boundary. It is frequently assumed that greater final lengthening
occurs in final syllables (Oller, 1973; Hofhuis et al., 1995), and this probably
explains the greater n-realization for plural nouns than for compounds. 9
In contrast to the claims of some linguists who are not convinced that
linking en is related to the plural suffix -en (de Haas & Trommelen, 1993;
Verkuyl, 2007), the present results show a strong correlation between the
pronunciations of plural endings and linking elements for different regions of
the Netherlands: The regional speech variation that occurred in plural endings
predicts the pronunciation variation in linking elements. On the basis of our
findings, we conclude that speakers from different regions of the Netherlands
do not distinguish between the linking en and the plural -en in their speech
9 An alternative explanation could be that speakers sometimes consider Dutch linking en as a
meaningless element, not related to the plural suffix. In that case, one may expect our study to
provide pairs of test items in which the compound is pronounced with [ə] and the corresponding
phrase with [(ə)n]. We took the data from region Middle as a sample to test this possible
explanation and compared the pronunciations of pairs with linking en and plural -en (e.g.,
noot+en+kraker - noot+en kraken, ‗nutcracker - to crack nuts‘). The speakers of this region
pronounced all item pairs most often identically (80% of all cases), except in a minority of cases:
the linking element pronounced as [ə] and the plural noun as [(ə)n] (14%) or reverse (6%). For
the latter group (i.e., 20% of the cases in which the item pairs were pronounced differently), no
item pair was found to be pronounced differently by most speakers. If the alternative explanation
was true, one would expect a large number of speakers to pronounce the same item pair
differently, which was not the case. Therefore, we consider a prosodic explanation for the
difference in n-realization between plural endings and linking elements to be more plausible here.
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