Linking elements in compounds - LOT publications

SIMILARITY OF PLURAL ENDINGS AND LINKING ELEMENTS
the words-and-rules theory (Pinker, 1999) because both exclude the occurrence
of regular plural nouns as modifiers in compounds. 12
Another important finding is that the speakers from Friesland (i.e., the
Northern region in this study) did not tend to show a difference in their
pronunciations of the plural -en and the linking en, while such a pronunciation
difference is typically assumed for the Frisian language (Hoekstra, 1996). It is
certainly possible that these speakers might only show such differences when
speaking Frisian and not when speaking Dutch (Hanssen et al., 2011b). The
present study shows that Frisian speakers seem to adapt their grammar when
speaking Dutch.
One region of the Netherlands was found to behave quite differently from
the other regions. The speakers from the Southern region (i.e., Limburg)
showed no difference whatsoever in the realization of the en in phrases versus
compounds, while the speakers in the other regions showed greater n-
realization in phrases than in compounds. The speakers from the Southern
region of the Netherlands also did not show a preference for the use of [ə] or
[ən] in either phrases or compounds. These speakers showed approximately
12 Van de Velde and van Hout (1998) distinguish three right-hand contexts that affect Dutch [n]deletion:
a vowel, consonant or pause. Our study used only consonants as right-hand context
thus we cannot compare our results with van de Velde and van Hout (1998). However, de Wulf
and Taeldeman (2001) zoom in on two groups of consonants that affect Dutch [n]-deletion (see
2.2.2, ‗Stimuli and design‘): the consonants t-, d-, b-, or h-, and other consonants (not t-, d-, b- or
h-). When we include these two groups of consonants in our statistical analyses (a linear-mixed
effect model with a logit link function, with subject and word as crossed random effects,
Condition, Region and Phonological context as independent variables, and the [n]-realization
scores as the dependent variable), we found a marginal main effect of Phonological context (β =
0.51, z(3181) = 1.76, p < .1), a significant interaction between Region West and Phonological
context (β = 0.92, z(3173) = 2.30, p < .05) and a marginal interaction between Region South and
Phonological context (β = 0.64, t(3172) = 1.78, p < .1). However, the results were not always in
the expected direction on the basis of the predictions of de Wulf and Taeldeman (2001). These
results hint that the right-hand consonant plays a role in our data for speakers of some regions.
Future studies should investigate this interesting question in more detail. Surprisingly, the
differences between nouns and compounds completely disappear when including phonological
context in the analyses (β = 0.37, z(3186) = 1.49, p = .14), indicating that speakers pronounce
both categories identically.
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