Linking elements in compounds - LOT publications

SIMILARITY OF PLURAL ENDINGS AND LINKING ELEMENTS
can slow the speech rate of a speaker in the standard language as speaking the
standard language may ―feel‖ less natural. The speakers from the Southern
region in our study may thus have been less fluent speaking standard Dutch
than the other speakers in our study which may have slowed their speech rate.
A slowed speech rate may have obscured differences due to final lengthening in
phrases versus compounds, although this presumably caused the phonological
differences in the pronunciations of plural endings versus linking elements in
the other regions of the Netherlands.
In sum, pronunciation variation was found for both plural -en and linking en
in standard Dutch. Moreover, a systematic relation between the pronunciations
of plural -en and linking en was detected: Speakers from the Northern and
Eastern regions produced [(ə)n] most often for both the linking elements and
plural endings, while speakers from the Middle and Western regions produced
[ə] most often for both. For speakers from the Southern region, we found no
preference to pronounce either [ə] or [ən] in compounds or phrases.
Furthermore, almost all of the speakers studied here showed a tendency to
realize more often an [n] in plural nouns than in compounds, which can be
explained by prosodic differences between the two contexts. Illustrative of the
possible influence of dialect are the speakers from the Southern region. Their
pronunciations of en in phrases and compounds were found to be identical and
contained a relatively high rate of n-realization. The variety occurring in plural
endings in the Limburg dialects and a slower speech rate may have caused these
results. We conclude that speakers from different regions of the Netherlands
do not distinguish between the linking en and the plural -en in their speech
production. Possibly, speakers of Dutch consider linking en and plural -en as the
same morpheme.
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