Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2013

This paper discusses the DiDDD-project (Diversity in Dutch DP Design) which ran at Utrecht University from 2005-2010 and was funded by NWO. The project investigated the morpho-syntactic variation in the nominal domain of Dutch dialects, Frisian dialects and older varieties of Dutch. Its purpose was to describe the variation within the nominal domain, to analyze it within the framework of generative grammar and to iden Read More

What is explanation, and what is there to explain in linguistics? I take the reader on a small excursion into explanation, and to puzzles in linguistics that fascinate me. For instance, we as linguists are so used to the existence of conditions on binding. Yet, in this contribution I ask readers to do a small step back and wonder why there would be conditions on binding at all. And if so, why would they have to be special? Any approach Read More

Traditionally, in formal linguistics no distinction is made between the roles of the speaker and the listener when investigating the properties of the grammar. Rather, it is assumed that these roles can be merged into a combined speaker-listener role. In this paper I discuss the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect in language acquisition. This effect has been observed in English-speaking and Dutch-speaking children’s comprehensi Read More

A recent social media upheaval on the grammaticality of a certain sentence from a popular song written on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Dutch king turns into an interesting linguistic discussion. The sentence appears to involve the extraction of a relative subject pronoun from a seemingly factive sentential complement, and in line with facts from other languages (a.o. whom in English), the relative subject pronou Read More

In this squib, I discuss the semantics of Dutch adverbs of medium degree. The goal is to identify which scalar properties are part of the semantics of such expressions. I refrain from giving a definitive formal-semantic account, but I do argue that the scalar meaning of such expressions is much more complex than the identification of a particular (e.g. midrange, high range, etc.) region on a scale.

In this squib, it is suggested that the auction website Markplaats.nl constitutes a valuable corpus for the linguistic study of regional variation. By way of example it is shown that the infinitival construction with voor te rather than om te is more widespread in the Netherlands than has been claimed in the literature.

The occurrence of determinerless subjects in an absolute construction in Dutch might suggest a grammaticalized mechanism of left-edge determiner omission.

As globalization has brought about social changes not seen previously, this squib sketches outlines for a renewal of the field of dialectology. The primary concern is how these changes are reflected in young people’s identity construction and expression, expecting an intricate interplay between the attractions of global and local culture. This may be dealt with by mapping out and analyzing communication in the Dutch co Read More

Metonymy cannot only shift the interpretation of a word, but also change the argument type required by a verb. Lexicologists were the first who considered this phenomenon as metonymy-based. For Dutch direct objects, this type of metonymy has been exhaustively analysed (Sweep 2012). Subjects can probably undergo the same processes (cf. Waltereit 1998; 1999). Therefore, this preliminary investigation examines subjec Read More