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Linking morphs, stress and meaning in Dutch complex caritive adjectives
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Nederlandse Taalkunde, Volume 29, Issue 3, Dec 2024, p. 287 - 333
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- 01 Dec 2024
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Abstract
Dutch morphologically complex caritive adjectives ending in loos ‘-less’ present three explananda. [i] Where there is a choice between a variant including a linking morph (‘lm’) to the immediate left of loos and one lacking a lm, this choice is usually not random: in alternating pairs, the lm-less forms tend to have a literal interpretation while the forms with a lm frequently show a certain degree of semantic specialisation. [ii] Nominalisation of loos forms with heid ‘-ness, -hood’ can shift main stress to loos, particularly when a lm precedes loos. [iii] For loos+heid forms with variable stress, stress on loos can give rise to an interpretation pertaining to events/situations rather than to individuals. This paper accounts for all three properties, built upon an analysis of the morphosyntax of caritive loos according to which the presence of a lm requires a syntactic derivation involving a complex predication structure while the structure of loos forms without lm is ambiguous in principle between a syntactically complex one and an alternative involving compounding.