Morphological variation in the speech of Frisian-Dutch bilinguals

Abstract

In standard Dutch, the plural suffix -enis homographic and homophonic with the linking suffix -en(boek+en“books”,boek+en+kast“bookcase”), both being pronounced as schwa. In Frisian, there is neither homography nor homophony (boek+en“books”, pronounced with syllabic nasal;boek+e+kast“bookcase”, pronounced with a linking schwa). Seeing that many areas of Frisian grammar are subject to interference from Dutch, we investigated whether Frisian-Dutch bilinguals exhibit interference from Dutch with respect to the linking suffix during Frisian speech production. Two types of Frisian-Dutch bilinguals emerged: Speakers who had Dutch as their first language tended to maintain the Dutch system of homophony between plural and linking suffixes when speaking Frisian, by using the Frisian plural as a linking morpheme. Speakers who had Frisian as their first language often maintained the Frisian system of no homophony when speaking Frisian. The implications for morphological theories are discussed.

Finding the sweet spot: Learners’ productive knowledge of mid-frequency lexical items

“…Using a small number of trained, independent annotators is considered superior to a larger number of untrained annotators (Bhardwaj & Ide, 2010), in-line with other fine-grained linguistic annotations and transcriptions (e.g. Crossley et al 2015; Hanssen et al, 2015). To assess inter-annotator reliability, simple agreement rates (e.g.…”

“…Annotator 3 acted as an adjudicator for the items for which there was disagreement between the original annotators. Using a small number of trained, independent annotators is considered superior to a larger number of untrained annotators (Bhardwaj & Ide, 2010), in-line with other fine-grained linguistic annotations and transcriptions (e.g., Crossley et al 2015;Hanssen et al, 2015). To assess inter-annotator reliability, simple agreement rates (e.g., Hovy et al, 2006) were calculated rather than the commonly used Kappa.…”