Taal en Tongval - Volume 61, Issue 1, 2009

Southern Brabant dialects of Dutch provide constructions such as: (a) ik heb iemand niet gezien (I did not see anybody) (b) Ik heb niemand niet gezien (I did not see nobody) The traditional view is that (a), with a positive quantifier expression developed from (b) with a negative one (cf. Van der Auwera & Neuckermans 2003). In this article the opposite development is proposed. Read More

Frisian nouns ending in schwa (henceforth: schwa nouns) like brêge (‘bridge’) show unpredictable behaviour when used as a first member of a nominal compound. In some cases the schwa is retained (e.g. brêgeman ‘bridge man’), in other cases the schwa can or must be dropped (e.g. bûsjild ‘pocket money’, from bûse ‘pocket’). Although there are no fixed rules two factors turn out to be crucial: the (non)optionality of t Read More

This study discusses Versloot 2008, an important contribution to the study of language variation in older Frisian, based on charters and codices. Special attention is paid to (a) how theses charters and codices are used by Versloot in order to obtain linguistic results, and (b) to the statistical treatment of the data. It is argued that with respect to 2 x 2 tables the Fisher Exact test one-tail should be preferred to X2.

boekbesprekingen