Abstract
This paper evaluates recent developments in the inflection of Frisian past participles and how to account for them with the aid of a model of morphological productivity. In Frisian, there are two alternative types of past participles which both have their origin in the South-western dialect region of Fryslân, but of which only one is spreading productively across the whole language area. The natural existence of contact between the original dialect region and the rest of the language area, in theory enables both alternative types to spread. Also, both of them can be described with rules. We will therefore argue that the reason for the spread of only one of the alternatives is due to the productivity of its underlying rule. Specifically, we will argue that the Tolerance Principle (Yang, Linguis Var Yearb 5(1):265–302, 2005, The price of linguistic productivity: how children learn to break the rules of language. MIT Press, 2016) predicts both the difference in productivity between the two alternatives, as well as the productive spread of one of the alternatives outwards from the dialect region in which it originated.
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- 1.
The choice for the -d or -t affix is a purely phonological issue; stem-final voiceless consonants take -t, elsewhere -d is inserted (Tiersma 1999).
- 2.
Note that the difference between single or double vowels, such as a and aa in this example, is orthographic. Both of them here represent the long vowel [a:].
- 3.
In line with the online Frisian Grammar at Taalportaal.org (Dyk 2015), we distinguish three types of inflection classes: weak, strong and irregular. Weak are those classes that are totally regular. The strong class exhibits various vowel alternation patterns for tense marking. Irregular verbs show both vowel and consonant alternations, varying over tense, person and number.
- 4.
For examples of forms that, contrary to the Frisian past participles, do not seem to compete, see the study by Thornton (2019), which shows that many languages at one point exhibit some cases of what is defined as overabundance: situations in which two (or more) inflectional forms co-exist.
- 5.
Mann-Whitney tests were used to follow up this finding. A Bonferroni correction was applied and so all effects are reported at a .008 level of significance.
- 6.
- 7.
Note that geminate consonants are not phonologically distinctive in Frisian and an underlying form /pra:tt/ will come out as [pra:t] in the surface form. The same applies later on, for the type II forms with a potential double /n/.
- 8.
Note that there is no such difference between the type I participles and their strong lookalikes, because most of these strong verbs do not show stem alternations in their past participles.
- 9.
Frisian and Dutch verbal morphology are quite similar, see also the grammar by Popkema (2006) for comparisons.
- 10.
Note that here we refer to an absolute token frequency of >1 of the respective past participles in the CGN.
- 11.
The goal of this paper was explicitly not to provide an account of the mere existence of the alternative forms (which would require a separate historical study).
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Merkuur, A., Don, J., Hoekstra, E., Versloot, A.P. (2019). Competition in Frisian Past Participles. In: Rainer, F., Gardani, F., Dressler, W., Luschützky, H. (eds) Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation . Studies in Morphology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_8
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