The Power of Plural

Abstract

This chapter reports on developmental processes in written morphology. Focus is on the learning of the rules for written morphology of adjectives in Dutch. In Dutch, this is a simple morphological rule, mastered rather early in primary school. Agreement rules between noun and adjective — number, gender — hardly play a role in the Dutch morphological system regarding adjectives. However, during primary school, the power of plural in adjacent nouns interferes with the correct application of the rule. In the case of material adjectives (golden in golden chair) and verbal adjectives (painted in painted chair), learning phases are indicated by students’ mixing the adjective rule and the noun-plural rule: although the adjective rule has already been mastered, one may find the occurrence of particular errors at a later stage. In short, the power of plural in adjacent nouns dominates the spelling of adjectives at a certain moment, and we take this moment as indicative of a particular learning stage. As an explanation, it may be expected that children invent agreement rules (like in Romance languages) guided as they are by a semantic awareness of plurality. This could be the case in Dutch, even when no agreement rule between noun and adjective exists. In the discussion, we hypothesize that the children are distracted by the form-function relations in Dutch morphemes for plural in nouns and verbs (—en), material adjectives (—en), and normal adjectives (—e). All these morphemes have different functions, but there is no audible difference. They are homophone: the n in the —en morpheme for plural is not pronounced. When they write —en in adjectives, instead of —e, which difference can not be heard in fluent speech, children may want to establish a plural in the adjective, which does not exist in the Dutch language system.