Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 136, Issue 4, 2020

Both Dutch and (West) Frisian make use of the exclamative particle wat (‘how’), that adds an element of surprise about a high degree of something to the semantics of the sentence. In this paper I will first show the similarities between the use of the particle in the two languages. I will demonstrate that, in Dutch, its use is largely confined to constructions that are semantically scalable, whereas in Frisian this restriction is far less strict. I will explain the difference by showing that Dutch wat is a syntactic amplifier of lexical phrases, whereas Frisian wat has developed into a pragmatic amplifier of the core predicate. I will try to account for that difference by showing how homophonous words absent in Dutch are likely to have influenced the use of Frisian wat, and how Dutch prosody strengthens the connection between wat and the amplified lexical phrase, whereas Frisian prosody weakens it. Finally, I will show that the system described as ‘Frisian’ is occasionally found in varieties of Dutch too

In his function of secretary of the city of Antwerp Jan van Boendale (also named Jan de Clerck) played his part in the international events of the first half of the fourteenth century. He describes these events in his books, and contemporary documents give additional information. In his works he shows a marked interest in king Edward iii of England, about whom he wrote two dedicated historiographical texts and whom he mentions at some length in two other texts, especially in relation to the Hundred Years War. The fact that he wrote so much about a foreign king is intriguing. This might be (partly) explained by the fact that he was in contact with the king at least eight times in the period from 1338 to 1342. British charters provide biographical information about the interaction of Boendale with the king on behalf of the Duke of Brabant.

This article examines representations of urban destruction and of rising waters in Pieter Boskma’s Tsunami in de Amstel (2016) and in Guido van Driel’s De ondergang van Amsterdam (2007). It foregrounds the ways in which these texts reflect productively on visualisations and narrative frames of catastrophe, and how they propose alternative temporalities (in the case of Boskma) and alternative visual perspectives (in van Driel) for imagining possible urban end-times. At the background of this article is an increased tendency in ecocritical approaches to read representations of destructive climate change (in prose literature, in particular) in terms of their implications for understanding real-world radical climatological and environmental change. Such perspectives are complemented here with an examination of allegorical readings of flood in a poetry collection and graphic novel.