Genus en naamwoordverplaatsing in het Westvlaams.

Gender and N-movement in West Flemish The variation in word order between English (la) and Italian (lb) has been interpreted in terms of DP-internal head-movement. (1) a. English a white cat b. Italian un gatto bianco *a cat white *un bianco gatto Based on work by Harris (1991), Bernstein (1993) argues that the trigger for leftward N-movement rests in the presence or absence of the terminal vowel on N, which marks gender or noun-class. Typically, Italian masculine nouns end in -o and feminine nouns end in -a. For languages with overt gender marking of this kind she postulates a DP-internal functional head WM (word marker). The availability of WM correlates with (i) indefinite N ellipsis and (ii) N-movement. She postulates that Romance languages have the head WM, while Germanic languages lack WM. WF data show that the correlation between the availability of a terminal vowel, i.e. the functional head WM, and lower N-movement cannot be maintained. The language lacks lower N-movement: (2) a. een zwarte katte b. *een katte zwart(e) a black cat a cat black In Bernstein's approach, absence of N-movement in WF, as displayed in (2a,b), would correlate with absence of the WM/terminal vowel. However, in WF there is a systematic correlation between the final schwa and feminine gender. Indeed, the WF evidence for a WM head is more robust than that provided by Bernstein in support of the WM in French. (3) illustrates a minimal pair, where terminal -e is pronounced [a]. (3) a. bom masc 'bottom' b. bomme- fem 'bomb' My conclusion is that presence of terminal vowels as such cannot be the trigger for N-movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]