An Optimality Theoretical analysis of the Dutch diminutive

The analysis of the diminutive in Dutch has been a topic of debate among phonologists and morphologists for almost one and a half centuries. There are five allomorphs in the standard language, there is a lot of variation between dialects, and there is variation between speakers for diminutives of morphologically complex and rarely used words. As a result, previous analyses have argued over the data, the shape of the underlying form of the morpheme and the sets of rules which would derive the surface alternants. These rules have usually been highly complex, and idiosyncratic for the diminutive — that is, the phonological rules concerned were marked for applying only in the context of the diminutive morpheme. On a theoretical level, morpheme-specific rules are a problem in a framework such as Optimality Theory, in which constraints are assumed to be universal, i.e. not specific to particular languages and, a fortiori, not specific to particular morphemes in particular languages. Thus, the Dutch diminutive, with at least three such morphophonological rules, is an obvious challenge to the OT framework and invites re-analysis. In this investigation, I present the outlines of an OT-style analysis of the allomorphy in the standard language, comparing this to earlier rule-based work. I will show that the language-specificness can be circumvented to a large degree in a constraint-based framework, which, additionally, captures a number of phonological regularities that are not expressed by the rule-based approach.