Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2011

More and more speakers of Dutch use the “object” personal pronoun hun as the subject of a sentence, although there is a strong social stigma attached to this use. In this article, we investigate what makes hun such a good subject in present-day Dutch. Basing the analysis on data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch, we predict that the use of hun as a subject will remain alongside the use of zij and ze, because hun has the advantage of referring exclusively to animate entities such as humans, unlike the competing forms zij and ze.

Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are often visible in the inflectional system. This also holds for Dutch, where verbal and adjectival inflection are vulnerable in children with SLI. A set of experiments shows that Dutch children with SLI make the same type of overgeneralizations as typically developing children make (and that their mistakes differ from adults acquiring Dutch as a second language). On the other hand, it is shown that SLI is more than just a delay. A comparison of a group of younger and older children with SLI suggests that some effects on inflection are long-lasting. It is argued that the evidence can best be understood if it is assumed that SLI is a result of problems in the processing and interpretation of the input. The same problems may also disturb the production of inflection once the relevant rules have been acquired.

From the 16th century onward, the 2nd person singular pronoun du ‘you’ has been replaced by new pronouns gij/jij/jii in many Dutch dialects. The standard explanation attributes the decline to the emerging honorific plural pronouns such as gij in singular use. However, this sociological explanation lacks predictive power: French, German and Frisian honorifics (vous, Sie, jo) did not cause disappearance of tu/du/dou, nor did they do so in various dialects in the Netherlands. Alternatively, language internal triggers have been proposed that situate the trigger in the verbal inflection, e.g. ‘deflection’. These proposals, however, suffer from similar defects. In this study the problem is approached with dialect geographic tools using the GTRP dialect database. A significant correlation is found between the disappearance of du and the rise of double present tense paradigms (direct and inverted). It is found that Zwart’s result of distinct spell-out of V in direct and inverted contexts is paralleled in pronoun spell-out: those dialects that do not have distinct verbal spell-out show distinct pronoun spell-out in direct and inverted contexts. By formulating position dependent spell-out rules, it can be shown that the transition of one dialect type to the other can be held responsible for the loss of the pronoun specific to specCP (du).

It is a widely accepted view that Dutch (verbal) predicates can take a maximum of one prepositional object complement, the so-called ‘voorzetselvoorwerp’. If there is a second prepositional phrase in the sentence, it is relegated to the realm of adjuncts. This article argues for an analysis accommodating the possibility of two prepositional object complements with one predicate, just as in the case of nominal objects. These prepositional objects have, just like the nominal ones, to be distinguished internally on relational and hierarchical grounds.