Resistance to erosion in American Dutch inflection

Abstract

An investigation of morphological erosion patterns in American Dutch (AD) inflection. Based on a corpus of AD collected by interview & a translation test (English to Dutch) with second- /third-generation speakers of Dutch as a secondary language (N = 10), an analysis of the linguistic characteristics of AD is presented & compared to the characteristics of Continental Dutch (CD). AD is found to show strong evidence of language interference (from English) & language attrition, & their collective effect on inflection is referred to as "erosion." Although AD inflection is highly variable, & generally deviates from CD, it is observed that some AD inflectional patterns are apparently more resistant to erosion than others, as they correspond closely to CD. It is predicted that the frequency & regularity of linguistic forms should be factors promoting their retention. An examination of the AD data on nominal plurals, present tense verbs, & preterite tense verbs shows that regularity is the primary factor in the generally uneroded noun plurals, although the retention of many irregular forms in the highly eroded preterite tense suggests frequency to be the primary factor there. Various hypotheses are offered for specific patterns of erosion in AD, & it is concluded that frequency is a stable but marginal factor in the retention of inflected forms, whereas regularity is unstable. 13 Tables, 1 Figure, 25 References. S. Novak