Karen Keune, Mirjam Ernestus, Roeland van Hout, R. Harald Baayen
Variation in Dutch: From written MOGELIJK to spoken MOK
In Dutch, high-frequency words with the suffix
-lijk are often highly reduced in spontaneous unscripted speech. This
study addressed socio-geographic variation in the reduction of such words
against the backdrop of the variation in their use in written and spoken Dutch.
Multivariate analyses of the frequencies with which the words were used in a
factorially contrasted set of subcorpora revealed significant variation
involving the speaker’s country, sex, and education level for spoken Dutch, and
involving country and register for written Dutch. Acoustic analyses revealed
that Dutch men reduced most often, while Flemish highly educated women reduced
least. Two linguistic context effects emerged, one prosodic, and the other
pertaining to the flow of information. Words in sentence final position showed
less reduction, while words that were better predictable from the preceding word
in the sentence (based on mutual information) tended to be reduced more often.
The increased probability of reduction for forms that are more predictable in
context, combined with the loss of the suffix in the more extremely reduced
forms, suggests that high-frequency words in -lijk are undergoing a
process of erosion that causes them to gravitate towards monomorphemic function
words.
Corpus Linguistics and Lingustic Theory, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 1613-7027
Volume: 1, 11/2005
Pages: 183 - 223
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