Another perspective on consonant harmony in Dutch

Abstract

In this thesis I investigate patterns of consonant harmony in Dutch which appear to be at odds with consonant harmony data from other languages such as English and French. In order to achieve this, I undertake a recompilation of the original Dutch data. I examine two individual case studies involving children from a corpus documenting phonological development in Dutch. I describe these case studies from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, in order to provide a representative account of the factors driving harmony. This study reveals that a series of production strategies exist (mainly of segmental substitutions) that are independent from harmony itself but that result in harmonized forms. I demonstrate that the tendencies observed in the data are largely predictable from the general phonotactics of the language which, I hypothesize, affect the children's analysis of their language and, as such, yield the production strategies observed in the data.