Ordinal Formation in Standard Dutch and Dialects of Dutch

Dutch ordinals are constructed by adding one of two suffixes, -de or -ste, to the corresponding cardinal. The distribution of the two suffixes over the ordinal paradigm and the motivations behind it are not evident and no serious attempts have been made so far in the literature to formulate an analysis which covers all the facts. Works like Barbiers (2007), Booij (2010) and Zonneveld (2007) have briefly touched upon the subject and hinted at possible phonological explanations, in terms of optimization processes and OT rankings, which do not seem to hold. Instead, I propose that for Dutch, Brabantish and West Flemish (two dialects of Dutch) and a number of other Germanic languages, the suffix selection divides the ordinal number lines of each language into morphosyntactically distinguishable subparts; and that the driving force behind this selection is an underlying morphological complexity of some of the cardinal stem forms. The primary research question is can we find evidence for morphological complexity among the cardinal numbers of the Germanic languages?

In my talk I will show the data from Standard Dutch, the two dialects (Sleeman, 2015), and from some (not all) of the other Germanic languages that I will be looking at. The latter include German, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, Swedish, Danish, Nynorsk, Bokmål, Icelandic and Faroese. I will present where the similarities and differences lie, and put the patterns in a theoretical perspective: I will demonstrate some phonological Optimality Theory attempts at predicting the forms and then show that these predictions are not borne out. I will compare the predictions of the OT framework to the predictions made by a different framework called morphological subcategorization (Paster, 2006, 2009; Bye, 2007), which hopefully will do a better job at explaining the data. In this framework, suffixes determine their distribution by means of requirements to their potential stems. I propose that some of the ordinal suffix allomorphs in the Germanic languages require their stems to be morphologically complex.