Geert Booij
'It appears that Dutch is not only geographically halfway between English and German, but also from a morphological point of view: its inflection is richer than English, but poorer than German' writes Geert Booij...
Dutch is the main standard language of the Netherlands, and one of the standard languages of Belgium. By now it has more than 20 million speakers, and it is therefore an important language within the European community.
Morphology deals with the ways in which the words of a language are formed (word formation), and how the correct form of words as used in sentences are computed (inflection). Morphology can teach us that knowing a language not only means that we are able to make proper use of words and the rules for combining them into sentences, but also knowing how to extend the fund of words and word forms of that language.
This book on the morphology of Dutch has two specific scientific aims. First, it is meant as an internationally accessible description of the morphology of Dutch. So far, a full-fledged description of the Dutch morphological system was not available in English. The availability of such a description, that is, of a theoretically informed reference work on Dutch morphology appeared to be a desideratum among colleagues working on descriptive, typological, theoretical or computational issues in linguistics. Moreover, it is now possible to write such a reference work because there are a lot of detailed studies of Dutch morphology, both with a descriptive and a theoretical orientation, on which it can be based. This book can also be used to gain access to these detailed studies which can be found in the references. The list of references is a selection only from the vast number of publications on the morphology of Dutch, with a focus on publications in English.
The second ambition of this book is to show that the morphology of Dutch poses many interesting descriptive and theoretical challenges, and that its detailed analysis can contribute substantially to the ongoing discussion on theoretical issues such as the nature of word formation processes, the relation between the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis of language structure, the interaction of morphology with phonology, syntax, and semantics, rule-based versus constraint-based grammar, and the balance between storage and computation. Therefore, this book can also be used in advanced courses in morphology for the clarification and illustration of theoretical issues.
For speakers of English, a language with poor inflection, it will be interesting to see how far Dutch differs in this respect from English. Actually, it appears that Dutch is not only geographically halfway between English and German, but also from the morphological point of view: its inflection is richer than English, but poorer than German. In the realm of word formation, many desciptive and theoretical issues are the same for English and Dutch, and so this book might also serve the reader to get more insight into patterns of English word formation.
The book contains indices for languages, authors, and phenomena, and thus it will also be useful as a reference work for people who look for specific kinds of information.
Geert Booij
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