Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2012

The present paper argues for a further exploration of a proposal to analyze the Dutch tense system in terms of binary oppositions rather than ternary, as in the standard approach advocated by Reichenbach (1947). The binary approach was first proposed by Te Winkel (1857; 1866). In a modernized version, the binary system turns out to evade a lot of problems haunting Reichenbachs system which is based on (naïve) ph Read More

The productive vocabulary of young typically developing Dutch children aged 1;08 to 3;04 has been investigated. In the lexicon of the children nine categories of word types and tokens are examined. For types, a noun bias can be reported in children up to 2;01 years of age. About one third of the lexicon consists of nouns. The number of verbs and function words increases with age. The number of onomatopoeic words decreas Read More

Question formation in French involving Subject Inversion may not affect indefinite subjects. This property – dubbed the counter-indefiniteness effect – is explained by integrating a Topic Phrase in syntax (Kayne & Pollock 2001). We show that this effect is also present in wh-questions in Dutch. In Dutch, the effect is independent of word order, but can be observed by taking into account the presence or absence of presentational e Read More