Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2009

The Dutch dialects display massive variation in their verbal paradigms. Traditionally, this variation has been explained as the result of developments in phonology, such as deletion of inflectional endings such as schwa, –t and –n, and pragmatics, such as the replacement of the 2sg. pronoun du with the honorific jij, which caused the s-ending to disappear. More recently, it has been proposed that morphology, more specifically paradigmatic structure, plays a role as well: the patterns of syncretism that are found in the verbal paradigms of the Dutch dialects, are believed to be manifestations of natural patterns of syncretism (e.g., Bennis & MacLean 2006). This article shows that these morphological accounts lack cross-linguistic support, and discusses data from Dutch that argue against paradigmatic structure as an explanatory factor. The focus lies on the 2pl.-data, where the shift of –t to –e(n) in Hollandic dialects has been argued to be the clearest example of a morphologically-driven change (Aalberse 2007). But this development too is better explained as the result of an interplay of pragmatic and prosodic factors, viz. the rise of the 2pl. pronoun jullie and the avoidance of a stresh clash occurring by the use of jullie in post-verbal position.

This paper is a corpus-based investigation of the imperatival infinitive in Dutch. It offers an analysis of the distribution and the frequency of the form in present-day and historical Dutch, with reference to the imperative. It also examines the pragmatic functions that the imperatival infinitive fulfills in contemporary discourse. The prototypical use of the form is defined and compared to the most convincing characterization of its semantics in the literature. The paper concludes with a study of the correlation of the imperatival infinitive with negation, which is explained in terms of politeness.

In the comprehensive Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst the order of constituents in the so-called middenstuk ‘middle field’ of the clause is obtained from the interaction of three principles: the inherence principle, the left-right principle and the complexity principle. In this contribution I will investigate the strength of these principles by analyzing the order of adjacent constituents in a small corpus of sports reports in newspapers. The basic assumption is that the reader of a sports report has a need to size up the middle field in order to find the arguments of the verb. It turns out that most middle fields contain two or more constituents; their order is determined by the inherence principle and, as a consequence, is mainly fixed. This applies especially to adjacent constituents that are both arguments. As for the order of other adjacent constituents the left-right-principle predicts the same order as the inherence principle. In contrast, the complexity principle seems only marginally relevant.

This article argues that certain forms of scrambling of nominal objects should be analyzed in a similar way as so-called object shift in the Scandinavian languages. The differences between the intended form of scrambling and object shift (as well as the differences concerning object shift between the individual Scandinavian languages) will be accounted for by appealing to an optimality-theoretic evaluation of the output representations of the computational system postulated by the minimalist program.