Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2013

This article deals with the cross-linguistically rare phenomenon of past tense imperatives and, more precisely, with the past perfect imperative in Dutch. With this construction, the speaker typically conveys the undesirability of a state of affairs that cannot be changed anymore and reprimands the addressee. The article examines the two functional accounts that have been proposed in the literature. Proeme (1984) provides a d Read More

In this paper we study three frozen imperative constructions in Dutch (geef op!, opgehoepeld!, and opgepast!) and inquire their highly specific reference properties: all arguments disallow for displaced reference, similar to what we see in animal communication (‘forum-readings’). We show that these seemingly idiosyncratic, frozen, and isolated properties can be derived from principles drawn from productive language com Read More

This article reviews Binary Tense theory as developed by Verkuyl (2008) on the basis of three oppositions proposed by Te Winkel (1866): present—past, synchronous—posterior and imperfect—perfect. Verkuyl followed Te Winkel in assuming that the verb zullen (‘will’) can be used as a temporal auxiliary expressing posteriority, but here it will be argued that zullen should be considered a purely modal verb and thus does not contri Read More

This contribution discusses three problems with the analysis of Dutch zullen (‘will’/’shall’) proposed by Verkuyl & Broekhuis. First, they do not distinguish systematically between instances in which the finite form is constituted by the main verb and instances in which the finite form is an auxiliary such as zullen; the semantics they assume for PRES is too vague to capture the interpretation of tensed forms, especially that Read More

This reply addresses Ronny Boogaart’s comments on our contribution Temporaliteit en modaliteit. A general problem with these comments is that Boogaart does not seem to appreciate that we make a strict distinction between semantics (the meaning of the sentence) and pragmatics (the use of the sentence in a given context). The former determines the situations in which a given sentence is true, whereas the latter determin Read More