Why is inflectional morphology difficult to borrow?�Distributing and lexicalizing plural allomorphy in pennsylvania Dutch
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Date
2021
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Abstract
: In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality.
In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy
has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings
from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic
objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different ?
root-types, resulting in
stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature
inventory to be �mixed,� consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as �pure� morphological features. A key claim of our analysis is that the s-exponent in Pennsylvania Dutch shares a
syntactic representation for native and English-origin ?
roots, although it is distinct from a �monolingual� English representation. Finally, we highlight how our treatment of plurality in Pennsylvania
Dutch, and allomorphic variation more generally, makes predictions about the nature of bilingual
morphosyntactic representations.
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Keywords
Syntax-morphology interface, Exponency, Bilingual mental lexicon, Plurality
Citation
: Fisher, Rose, David Natvig, Erin Pretorius, Michael T. Putnam, and Katharina S. Schuhmann. 2022. Why Is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?�Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch. Languages 7: 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages7020086