Diminutives and plurals of Dutch nouns

Abstract

In Dutch dictionaries, nouns appear with their plural and their diminutive. This reflects the intuition among native speakers that a noun normally has these two related forms. Traditionally, the plural is considered inflectional whereas the diminutive belongs to word formation. In his Parallel Architecture (PA), Jackendoff (2002) does not distinguish word formation and inflection. Here I argue that the Dutch contrast does not support this view. I first present plural and diminutive as categories, then briefly introduce PA, before proposing analyses of the plural and diminutive in Dutch.

Keywords

• Parallel Architecture
• inflection
• word formation
• diminutive
• plural