Fifty years of morphological theory in the Netherlands

Abstract

In1965, I became a student of Dutch and general linguistics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. At that time, an important change took place in the Netherlands as to the way in which languages are studied: not only as unique systems, but also as specimens of natural language in general. This meant that linguistic theory acquired a central position in the framing of research questions. The rise of generative grammar played an important role in this change of perspective within Dutch linguistics. In 1966, my Dutch linguistics professor Albert Sassen (1921-1999), a philologist and morphologist, introduced generative grammar into the Dutch study program in Groningen by discussing the first Dutch dissertation written in the framework of generative grammar, Kraak (1966), in his syntax course for 2 nd year students (I was one of them). A year later, professor Henk Schultink (1924-2017) of Utrecht University, who wrote a famous dissertation on the morphology of Dutch (Schultink 1962) and acted as co-supervisor of my dissertation (Booij 1977), published a long introductory article on generative grammar in De Nieuwe Taalgids, a traditional journal for students of Dutch (Schultink 1967). This illustrates how an older generation of linguists took these new developments very seriously. Thus, a new generation of linguists was raised with a strong orientation towards American and generative linguistics. Although the rise of generative grammar gave an enormous boost to grammatical research in the Netherlands, it took some time before morphological issues received proper attention, with at least one exception, Botha (1968), a dissertation written in the framework of generative grammar under supervision of Schultink, on compounding in Afrikaans and the nature of the lexicon. The first dissertation on morphology at MIT, written by Mark Aronoff in 1974, was published as Aronoff (1976). In 1975, Frans Zwarts invited Aronoff to give a lecture on generative morphology in Groningen. This event turned out to be the first Morfologiedag, a conference for Dutch linguists working on morphology. Jaap van Marle and I organized a second edition of this event at the University of Amsterdam in 1976. Since then, the Morfologiedag has been organized on an annual and sometimes bi-annual basis at various universities in the Netherlands and Belgium, and more recently it became a two-day conference, hence Morfologiedagen or Morphology Days. In addition, the TIN-dag (Linguistics in the Netherlands) became an important forum for morphological papers and discussions. The intellectual history behind Aronoff’s influential monograph is described by himself as follows: