Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2014

Modern colloquial standard Dutch has a number of features involving non-standard inflection (verbal, adnominal, pronominal; involving gender, person, number and case), which appear to participate in ongoing processes of deflection. We focus on ten constructions, nine of which concern non-standard inflection. After discussing each phenomenon from the perspective of its place in the grammatical system, we introduce an online survey on the evaluation and reported use of each phenomenon. Sociobiographical background data are available for over 1600 of the respondents, a third of whom claim to speak a specific Dutch dialect. The data for the 1515 Dutch respondents for each feature are analysed quantitatively on three different scales, as well as on a dialect-standard scale, for the reported own use as well as the perceived use in the respondents’ environments. The features appear to be stratified both according to evaluation and style. Several features turn out to be sensitive to the speakers’ dialect background, only few of them to sociobiographical background and a third subset to neither. At least one phenomenon seems to be subject to ongoing change, driven by age; some phenomena have de facto been elevated to the standard norm. In the patterning of the phenomena studied, internal grammatical factors do not appear to play a significant role as against sociolinguistic ones. Especially perceptual and evaluative considerations appear to determine the results.

In this paper, the results of a salience experiment in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview in which they were asked to evaluate seven audio recordings, spoken in several regional versions of tussentaal (literally ‘in-between-language’) or in Standard Dutch. The informants had to judge which language variety was spoken in the recordings and they had to motivate on which features they based their judgment of the language used. This paper aims to show that research on salience has almost exclusively focused on whether a linguistic item is salient or not and that not enough attention has been paid to interpersonal variation in salience.

This paper presents the results of a corpus study of Dutch complement PPs. On the basis of a collection of 3400 occurrences in negative sentences, the four major word order patterns (regular position, scrambling order, topicalization and extraposition) are studied, both in main and subordinate clauses, and linked to the properties of the prepositional phrases, in particular weight and definiteness. Greater weight corresponds to higher likelihood of extraposition, and definiteness to higher likelihood of scrambling and topicalization. This corresponds well with earlier studies of word order variation in Dutch, but had not been established for the class of complement PPs. Among definite phrases, PPs with so-called R-pronouns, such as hieraan ‘here-on’ and daarvan ‘thereof’ showed especially high preferences for topicalization and scrambling. Negative sentences were selected for this study to avoid cases where regular order and scrambling order could not be distinguished due to lack of adverbial elements in the middle field. The data set is temporally stratified. This made it possible to study changes over time, and the most robust finding was a continuous retreat of the scrambling order throughout the period 1700-2014.

It is often assumed that directional (or path) prepositional phrases (PPs) can serve as predicates. I will show that this assumption is not unproblematic, by making a comparison with locative (or place) PPs, especially where we expect both to show their predicative nature most directly, namely as attributive modifiers of nouns. If directional PPs cannot always function as predicates, as I will show, then this complicates their treatment as predicates in small clause analyses. Treating them as verb modifiers is then a more attractive alternative.