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) physics. Te Winkel takes an interesting mentalistic view that prevents the present from being identified with the floating point of speech. The present is taken as a domain harbouring it. The future tense is robbed from its deictic nature in favour of a more neutral form of posteriority. As to anteriority, the question arises of whether Dutch tense forms with hebben (have) express aspectual information or purely tense information. It will be argued that given a binary approach there is no need for grammatical aspect in languages having developed a tense opposition between imperfect and perfect.

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 decreases. Personal-social words decrease only in types, not in tokens.

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 er: the counterindefiniteness effect occurs in wh-questions in which er is present alongside a wh-word functioning as an internal argument. For the Topic Phrase we build a link with independent proposals by Bennis (1986) – the double (in)definiteness effect in Dutch - and Koeneman (2000), who proposes that er is related to empty presupposition sets. We elaborate our proposal in terms of the current generative formalisms (for Dutch e.g. Zwart 1997 and Broekhuis 2008). A semantic/pragmatic formulation of the effect would be that a question should not introduce an entity in discourse and simultaneously ask for other information about this entity.