Dutch and English are closely related languages, and they share a history of contact with French and Latin. It is therefore not surprising that the morphology of Dutch exhibits two lexical strata, just as English does. We’ll give just a brief illustration here. In Dutch, the suffix -heid ‘-ness’ is of native origin, and -iteit ‘-ity’ is non-native. As we saw in English, the native suffix attaches easily either to native or non-native bases, but the non-native one can only occur on non-native bases (Booij 2002: 95):

As in English, non-native affixes can occur on either bound bases or free words, whereas native affixes only occur on free words. And as in English, if a word contains both native and non-native affixes, the native ones must occur outside the non-native ones.

What may be somewhat more surprising is that French, a language itself descended directly from Latin, also shows signs of lexical strata (Huot 2005). French suffixes can be divided into those that are called ‘popular’ (in French ‘populaire’) and those that are called ‘learned’ (in French ‘savant’). The former have descended from Latin undergoing all the sound changes that the vocabulary of French has been subject to. The latter come from scholarly Latin by borrowing later in the history of French. Popular suffixes typically attach to popular roots, and learned suffixes to learned roots (Huot 2005: 65):

Popular suffixes sometimes attach to learned roots, but learned suffixes do not attach to popular roots:

Popular suffixes tend not to attach to already suffixed words, but learned suffixes can sometimes attach to other learned suffixes:

And finally, popular roots sometimes have corresponding learned allomorphs:

So what we see here is that there are two sets of affixes that display somewhat different patterns of behavior. The lexicon of French thus gives us another example where morphology is not neat and homogeneous, but instead seems to be organized into two relatively discrete layers.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Vowel length FACE/GOAT

Vowel length LOT/CLOTH/THOUGHT

The subjects on morphology and syntax

Lexemes and word forms: the situation outside English

Lexemes and lexical items: the situation outside English

Lexemes and lexical items: possible reasons for their overlap in English

A puzzle: disentangling lexemes, word forms and lexical items

Conclusion: history and structure

Fashions in morphology

Characteristics of Germanic and non-Germanic derivation

The reduction in inflectional morphology

The rarity of borrowed inflectional morphology