Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2021

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 both meaning and distributional characteristics, from the comparative adverb beter. By conducting three tests based on Broekhuis & Corver (2016), we show that it functions as a clause adverb in contrast to comparative beter, which functions as a VP-adverb. Moreover, we show that the adverb beter in the beter-construction shares important properties with modal and subjective adverbs. Adopting the generative-linguistic approach to clausal structure, we further propose that modal beter is a phrase that undergoes movement from a sentence-internal modifier position to the clause-initial position.

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 grammar over the past few decades. The picture that emerges is that long-distance movement appears to be currently most productive in English and least productive in German, whereas Dutch occupies an in-between position. As we will argue, the productivity of long-distance movement is strongly tied to the availability of functional alternatives. German has at least three of such alternatives that are fully productive, whereas Dutch has one particularly productive one. The alternative constructions do not involve long-distance movement: the dependency between the constituent in the matrix clause and the position in the embedded clause where it is interpreted is formed indirectly, in the semantics, and not via syntactic movement. In English, long-distance movement is most productive when the complementizer is deleted. This is not just the case for subject movement but also for non-subject movement. Special attention is paid to the so-called that-trace effect and its alleged absence in German and Dutch. The general conclusion is that long-distance movement is possible in all languages under consideration, but more restricted than commonly assumed.

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 brought together in this study, which looks into children’s exposure to language variation in Flemish child-directed media. Through a corpus analysis of the language use and the social characteristics of 260 characters from 12 audio plays for children, we address three research questions: (RQ1) how diverse is the language repertoire to which children are exposed in Flemish audio plays?; (RQ2) how can we categorize the language use of the characters in the audio plays while taking into account the diaglossic continuum of varieties in the Flemish linguistic landscape?; (RQ3) which social characteristics are indexed by the varieties in the audio plays? The results show that (i) the Flemish diaglossic language repertoire is reflected in the classification of the language use of the characters; (ii) Colloquial Belgian Dutch and the Belgian Dutch standard language serve as reference varieties in the corpus; (iii) the Belgian Dutch standard language is most typically associated with prestige, whereas West-Flemish and French have a notably more diverse social meaning potential.

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 encoding of ‘inalienable possession’ and come to the conclusion that the possessor of the inalienable possession is always the referent of an indirect object, be it on different syntactic levels. I want to explain why this is the case. This can be done by showing that the complex predicates in inalienable possession constructions are comparable to the dative verbs in constructions with a regular indirect object, due to the fact that they contain a constituent referring to inalienable possession. Our descriptions have much in common and if we see them as complementary, they can profit from each other.