Your ns are numbered! On linking morphemes in Dutch

Abstract

The expression of number (#) within the noun phrase has been argued to vary between a high (num) and a low position, which Kramer (2014) associates with n, providing the root with a syntactic category. We argue that Linking Morphemes (L) in Dutch provide new evidence for such a split, and moreover, for a low expression of # in a language that is normally considered to have high #. By taking L to instantiate n, the presence or absence of L can be taken as a diagnostic of the size of non-head elements. Combined with recent work on Germanic compounds (Harðarson 2016, De Belder 2017) this makes a prediction about the order of modifiers in Dutch compounds, which we show is borne out