The Dutch plural landscape

Abstract

This paper aims to test claims about Dutch pluralisation found in the literature against data on Dutch nouns and their plurals in a corpus from Van Dale. 1 With the information gained from this research I hope to get as complete a picture of pluralisation in Dutch as possible, and find out how strong the claims that are often made actually are on a quantitave basis. This information is vital for the development of test items for the wug-tests (Berko, 1958) I intend to do at a later stage. The nonce words that children will be tested on in these wug-tests should be representative of the Dutch plural landscape to mirror the input children receive. I will do these experiments to test the words-and-rules theory, as proposed by Pinker (1999). This theory, which I will explain in greater detail below, claims the use of a default affix for regular plurals. Dutch, however, has two plural affixes, neither of which is the default by well-established criteria, and could therefore be a problem for the theory. If the theory is universal, though, children are expected to show default use, even if adults do not. They will expect a situation with a single default. Default use will then manifest itself in overgeneralisations of one, not both, of the plural affixes and in productive use of their chosen default in the wug-test. The words-and-rules theory claims there are separate components for regulars and irregulars in the language faculty. The theory states that irregulars are stored in the mental lexicon, while rules are used to form regulars. The most important rival of the dual theory is the connectionist model (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986). According to this model both regulars and irregulars are stored in the mental lexicon. In the connectionist model, as well as in the dual model, the mental lexicon works as a pattern associator, organising the stored items according to patterns. In the dual model, however, when a stem is not found in the lexicon a rule applies by default. This rule attaches an affix to the stem to form, for instance, the past tense or the plural. Examples of an affix used by default, a default affix, are the English plurals in houses and the German plurals in Autos. How do we know which affix is used by default? Looking at the English example

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