Expressing Inflection Tonally

Abstract

In Limburg Dutch, the difference between neuter and feminine agreement on adjectives is expressed by a difference in lexical tone. This paper argues that this distinction is due to a difference in underlying representations and not to a paradigmatic antifaithfulness effect. In particular, it argues for a specific version of REALIZE-MORPHEME, the constraint demanding every underlying morpheme to be present in phonological surface representations. The key argument is that a schwa suffix turns up whenever the tonal change from neuter to feminine is not possible.

Keywords

• dialectology
• lexical tones
• morphology-phonology interface
• Optimality Theory
• paradigm uniformity
• Dutch