Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2013

This paper discusses the DiDDD-project (Diversity in Dutch DP Design) which ran at Utrecht University from 2005-2010 and was funded by NWO. The project investigated the morpho-syntactic variation in the nominal domain of Dutch dialects, Frisian dialects and older varieties of Dutch. Its purpose was to describe the variation within the nominal domain, to analyze it within the framework of generative grammar and to identify the parameters within this framework that facilitate the attested linguistic variation. The data from this project are publically available as part of the Mimore-project. This article can therefore be seen as background information for this project.

This paper discusses both the practical-methodological aspects of the project (methodology of data collection and storage) as well as the descriptive-theoretical dimensions by discussing the most important empirical generalizations.

What is explanation, and what is there to explain in linguistics? I take the reader on a small excursion into explanation, and to puzzles in linguistics that fascinate me. For instance, we as linguists are so used to the existence of conditions on binding. Yet, in this contribution I ask readers to do a small step back and wonder why there would be conditions on binding at all. And if so, why would they have to be special? Any approach to binding will have to face the challenge of the daunting diversity of surface manifestations of binding patterns. Taking the variation between Dutch, Frisian and English as a starting point I show that our standard binding conditions don’t in fact constitute a unitary phenomenon. Rather, they result from the interplay between different factors, in part not even specific to language: properties of predicates, our general inability to handle identicals in a space with insufficient structure, properties of chains, and general economy conditions. As I show, it is on the basis of such a deconstruction of the binding conditions into component factors that the unity underlying the diversity can be uncovered, and the curious patterns we find explained.

Traditionally, in formal linguistics no distinction is made between the roles of the speaker and the listener when investigating the properties of the grammar. Rather, it is assumed that these roles can be merged into a combined speaker-listener role. In this paper I discuss the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect in language acquisition. This effect has been observed in English-speaking and Dutch-speaking children’s comprehension of pronouns in binding environments, but not in their production of these pronouns. On the basis of this asymmetry between production and comprehension, I argue that for an adequate description and explanation of grammatical phenomena such as pronominal binding it is necessary to distinguish between the role and perspective of the speaker and that of the listener. Whereas Principle A of Binding Theory is a symmetric correspondence between a reflexive form and a reflexive meaning that is used similarly by speakers and listeners, Principle B is a derived pattern emerging when the listener takes into account the perspective of the speaker. The Delay of Principle B Effect is thus explained as children’s failure as a listener to consider the perspective of the speaker.

A recent social media upheaval on the grammaticality of a certain sentence from a popular song written on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Dutch king turns into an interesting linguistic discussion. The sentence appears to involve the extraction of a relative subject pronoun from a seemingly factive sentential complement, and in line with facts from other languages (a.o. whom in English), the relative subject pronoun seems to be interpreted by native speakers as an object, which is a problem for current syntactic theories.

In this squib, I discuss the semantics of Dutch adverbs of medium degree. The goal is to identify which scalar properties are part of the semantics of such expressions. I refrain from giving a definitive formal-semantic account, but I do argue that the scalar meaning of such expressions is much more complex than the identification of a particular (e.g. midrange, high range, etc.) region on a scale.

In this squib, it is suggested that the auction website Markplaats.nl constitutes a valuable corpus for the linguistic study of regional variation. By way of example it is shown that the infinitival construction with voor te rather than om te is more widespread in the Netherlands than has been claimed in the literature.

The occurrence of determinerless subjects in an absolute construction in Dutch might suggest a grammaticalized mechanism of left-edge determiner omission.

As globalization has brought about social changes not seen previously, this squib sketches outlines for a renewal of the field of dialectology. The primary concern is how these changes are reflected in young people’s identity construction and expression, expecting an intricate interplay between the attractions of global and local culture. This may be dealt with by mapping out and analyzing communication in the Dutch countryside, with particular attention to language use and stylistic choices made in everyday communication, both in face-to-face settings and on social media.

Metonymy cannot only shift the interpretation of a word, but also change the argument type required by a verb. Lexicologists were the first who considered this phenomenon as metonymy-based. For Dutch direct objects, this type of metonymy has been exhaustively analysed (Sweep 2012). Subjects can probably undergo the same processes (cf. Waltereit 1998; 1999). Therefore, this preliminary investigation examines subject changes in Dutch, on the basis of Van Dale’s (2005) use of the lexicological tag subjectverwisseling. After a classification and demarcation of the heterogeneous set of examples, clear instances of subject changes in Dutch are provided, different types of subject changes in Van Dale are identified, and their underlying contiguity patterns are analysed.