Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2021

Abstract This paper presents a qualitative analysis of a construction that has not been studied extensively yet, namely the Dutch beter-construction, as in Beter ga je bij Starbucks koffie halen, ‘You better get yourself a coffee at Starbucks’. The paper gives a detailed description of the syntactic structure and the pragmatics of the construction. We argue that the sentence-initial adverb beter in the beter-construction differs, in bot Read More

Abstract In this article, we present corpus data from Dutch and English on long-distance movement and discuss its diachronic development in Dutch, English and German. Long-distance movement is the displacement phenomenon characterized by the appearance of a part of a dependent clause in a higher clause (e.g. What crimes did the FBI discover he had committed?). It has played a central role within generative gram Read More

Abstract The field of sociolinguistics recently witnessed an upsurge of studies that investigate the way and period in which children acquire the social meaning of language, and that scrutinize the role of input for that acquisition. Language variation is at the same time increasingly studied in fictional genres, which have long been ignored because of the sociolinguistic emphasis on ‘authentic’ language use. Both areas are brou Read More

Abstract In this paper I explain the difference between the notions possessive dative and possessive accusative as used by me and other linguists like Vandeweghe (e.g. 1986 and 1987) and the notions dative and accusative inalienable possessors as used in Broekhuis et al. (2015). It is not so much the difference in the descriptive system I want to focus on, but the difference in aim. Broekhuis et al. want to specify the syntactic Read More