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  • The morphology of Dutch by Geert Booij
  • Laurie Bauer
The morphology of Dutch. By Geert Booij. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 253. ISBN: 019829980X. $26.00.

This a companion volume to Booij’s The phonology of Dutch (1995). B is ideally qualified to write such a book. Not only has he presented many analyses of Dutch morphology (published both in Dutch and in English) since his thesis (Booij 1977), but he is also one of the editors of the prestigious periodical Yearbook of Morphology and is thus up to date in his knowledge of morphological theory in general. He has previously written a textbook introduction to Dutch morphology for the Dutch (Booij & van Santen 1995), and the present volume is a state-of-theart presentation on the morphology of Dutch for people who do not understand enough Dutch to read Dutch originals.

After a short introduction, which focuses on the nature of morphological rules, productivity, and lexicalization, B has chapters on inflection (19–85), derivation (86–140), compounding (141–66), and the interface with phonology (167–86) and with syntax (187–224). The brief conclusion looks at the implications for ‘the architecture of the grammar’. There is a full reference list, with references to works in both Dutch and English, and there are three indexes (subject, author, and affix). The book is clearly and engagingly presented with only a very few minor exceptions, and I noted only two typographical errors, neither a serious impediment to understanding.

The work is rich in exemplificatory material, and one important feature is that alternative analyses of the same data are presented and arguments given for accepting B’s preferred analysis. Implications of these analyses for morphological theory in general are then pointed out (e.g. the comments against Robert Beard on p. 40 and against Stephen Anderson on p. 103).

One of the interests for the English-speaker in reading this book is to see the ways in which a closely-related language like Dutch can differ from English. B seldom makes a point of this, preferring to comment on similarities between the two languages in order to clarify some particular point in the exposition. Some of the differences derive from differing patterns of productivity in the two languages and differing uses of commonly-inherited material; some of them arise from the fact that Dutch—despite significant loans from Romance, Latin, and Greek—seems to maintain a more Germanic morphology than English does. Examples of the differences are pointed out in the discussion below.

In Ch. 2, B deals with the inflection of nouns (number, possession, and gender), of adjectives (degree, prenominal inflection, the nominalization of adjectives by -e, and partitive constructions), and of verbs (finite forms, periphrasis and aspect, and nonfinite forms). This is the only chapter in the book where B provides optimality theoretic tableaux to illustrate how competing affixes are selected, though the fundamental notion of affix choice being determined by output constraints runs through the explanations that are given here.

In addition to a few foreign nouns that have foreign plurals and fifteen nouns that take the suffix (or suffix-sequence—the solution B argues for) -eren, Dutch has two regular plural suffixes, -s and -en. Unlike in English, where -s has taken over almost entirely from -en, in Dutch both of these suffixes are common and productive. B presents an analysis in which the choice between affixes is determined prosodically, following the generalization that ‘a plural noun ends in a trochee’ (24). Atypically, he ignores alternative analyses whereby the choice of affix is determined segmentally and/or morphologically (see e.g. Geerts et al. 1984:60–66). Either of these analyses captures what is clearly a standard intuition among Dutch linguists: that the two endings are in complementary distribution. They are not. Geerts et al. 1984:66–69 lists a number of words where different plural forms are either in free variation or correlate with differences of meaning. B implies that variability occurs where either option leads to an output final trochee (25, 28), but the lists in Geerts et al. seem to deny that this is the only place where such doublets occur [End...

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