Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2011

More and more speakers of Dutch use the “object” personal pronoun hun as the subject of a sentence, although there is a strong social stigma attached to this use. In this article, we investigate what makes hun such a good subject in present-day Dutch. Basing the analysis on data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch, we predict that the use of hun as a subject will remain alongside the use of zij and ze, because hun has the adv Read More

Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are often visible in the inflectional system. This also holds for Dutch, where verbal and adjectival inflection are vulnerable in children with SLI. A set of experiments shows that Dutch children with SLI make the same type of overgeneralizations as typically developing children make (and that their mistakes differ from adults acquiring Dutch as a second language). On the other hand, Read More

From the 16th century onward, the 2nd person singular pronoun du ‘you’ has been replaced by new pronouns gij/jij/jii in many Dutch dialects. The standard explanation attributes the decline to the emerging honorific plural pronouns such as gij in singular use. However, this sociological explanation lacks predictive power: French, German and Frisian honorifics (vous, Sie, jo) did not cause disappearance of tu/du/dou, nor d Read More

It is a widely accepted view that Dutch (verbal) predicates can take a maximum of one prepositional object complement, the so-called ‘voorzetselvoorwerp’. If there is a second prepositional phrase in the sentence, it is relegated to the realm of adjuncts. This article argues for an analysis accommodating the possibility of two prepositional object complements with one predicate, just as in the case of nominal object Read More