Jan Don

Vrouwelijke persoonsnamen in het Nederlands

In this paper I argue that the formation of female personal nouns in Dutch provides no argument for so-called ‘paradigmatic’ means of word-formation. In the literature (Van Marle 1985, 1986) it has been argued that these nouns in particular provide an argument for paradigmatic word-formation. More in particular, Van Marle observes that female nouns in -ster only exist if there is a neutral personal noun in -er. He therefore concludes that in order to form female personal nouns in -ster, the grammar needs to check whether there is an existing word in -er. However, it can be demonstrated that such means are superfluous once we acknowledge that -er is the realization of a more abstract morpheme, which potentiates the affixation of a morpheme deriving female nouns, realized as -ster. Second, that Dutch hosts a haplology rule that deletes -er immediately before -ster. Since haplology is independently motivated (see e.g. Yip 1998, Nevins 2012), the present contribution provides an argument against paradigmatic means for word-formation.