One classy number: Linking morphemes in Dutch and German

Abstract

Germanic compounds often contain an element referred to as linkers, (L). These elements are homophonous with inflectional suffixes, like plural or case markers, but do not nec- essarily have the same meaning or function as the corresponding inflectional suffix. This is exemplified by Dutch below where, outside of compounds, schaap is obligatorily inter- preted as plural in the presence of the plural marker, (1a). This is not the case in compounds, where schaap is unspecified for number interpretation in the presence of the L in (1b) and does not necessarily match the choice of inflectional suffix outside of the compound in (1c). (1) Dutch (Krott et al. 2007:28) a. schaap -en sheep -PL ‘sheep’ b. schaap -en -bout sheep -L -leg ‘sheep leg’ c. schaap -s -kooi sheep -L -fold ‘sheep fold’ These L have received a wide range of analyses but typically they are analyzed as some- thing distinct from the corresponding inflectional suffixes. In this paper however, we argue, focusing on German and Dutch, that the behavior of L follows from their structural posi- tion. Following De Belder (2013), we argue that both Ls and the corresponding inflectional affixes are class markers and that the complex behaviors observed follows from their dis- tribution in the DP. Ls thus shed light on the feature system of the Germanic DP and their interactions. We furthermore propose that the presence or absence of L can be taken as an indicator of the size of the