Ethnolect speakers and Dutch partitive adjectival inflection. A corpus analysis

This study applies the methodology described by Gries Deshors (2014) within the framework of the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996) to the partitive genitive inflection in post-quantifier adjectives in the Moroccan Dutch ethnolect. This implies fitting a logistic regression model on data from the commensurable ConDiv and Moroccorp corpora to investigate the differences between the L1 variety and the (early L2 / 2L1) ethnolect variety. It was found that the Moroccan Dutch language users do not differ from ‘ordinary’ Dutch language users in the realisation of the partitive genitive -s suffix, neither through an outspoken preference for one of the inflectional variants, nor in the factors determining the alternation. This is considered a rather surprising result, as such differences do exist for a number of other grammatical phenomena (Cornips and Rooij 2003; Van de Velde and Weerman 2014). This finding can tell us something about the inflectional status of the partitive genitive. It appears that it is less untransparent than other quirks in adjectival inflection.