Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2017

This article summarizes earlier research done on the prosodic marking of interrogativity and imperatives in Dutch on the basis of recorded speech from male and female speakers. The first part of this article compares statements (ST) and three types of question. The form of questions may differ in various respects from statements: Wh-questions (WH) have a question word in initial position and exhibit subject-verb inversion, yes/no-questions (YN) have inversion only, while declarative questions (DE) have the same structure as ST. Our functional hypothesis that the intensity of interrogativity marking through prosody counterbalances the degree of syntactic marking in the order ST < WH < YN < DE is confirmed both by an analysis of the phonological choices made and by the details of the phonetic implementation of the melodies. The second part of the article compares statements and imperatives. All sentences were produced with three different attitudes: neutral, friendly and authoritarian. Our hypothesis that imperatives are prosodically marked in the same way as authoritarian statements seems to be confirmed, as an analysis of tone transcriptions reveals no systematic differences between them at the linguistic level. The difference is only weakly marked in the prosody at the phonetic level, in a way that suggests that the speaker raises his/her voice in imperatives (higher overall pitch, longer duration, greater intensity), which is also the way in which the authoritarian style of speaking differs from the other attitudes.

Van Heuven and Haan’s (2000, 2002) experimental work on the prosody of Dutch question types found that the prosodic signalling of interrogativity is stronger for declarative questions, less so for yes/no-questions and even less so for wh-questions. This paper shows how the sequence established on prosodic grounds (declarative questions > yes/no questions > wh questions > statements) is mirrored in the functional hierarchy in syntax. Prosody therefore provides an argument for a detailed left periphery (Rizzi 1997, 2001; Haegeman & Hill 2013).

Structuralism and formal grammar have, in the course of the 20^th century, rightfully taken issue with more vague and unfalsifiable just-so stories of some of their predecessors. For all its merits, though, the structuralist-formal strand of linguistics has its drawbacks as well. The classical Saussurean distinction between synchrony and diachrony can be harmful: a purely synchronic description is often inferior to the insight gained from diachrony, not only because grammar is laden with heirlooms and débris of prior structures and because languages draw on a wide variety of pathways to generate new grammar, but also because variation can often only be understood fully in the light of its history. Many cases of synchronic variation are the result of competition between an innovative mutant encroaching on an obsolescent construction. In such cases, the synchronic skew in the proportion of one variant to the other is not arbitrary, but is a reflection of how far the change has progressed. To the extent that one wants to incorporate variation in grammatical description – and there are sound theoretical reasons to do so – the historical perspective is indispensable. In this article four case studies from different corners of Dutch grammar are discussed (on cardinal numerals, on the Big Mess Construction, on bare infinitive complements of auxiliaries, and on the hortative). The case studies together form a plea for the historisation of the science of linguistics, just like biology has been historised, and indeed, as is shown in this article, there are numerous parallels between linguistics and biology.

The synchrony/diachrony issue must be sidestepped, since the ultimate question to be studied is: which psycholinguistic limitations does the human brain impose on its representation of language. These limitations involve frequency and analogy, which are the cause of ill-understood chaos-theoretic patterns of order. In particular, analogy must be formalised, and its interaction with frequency must be further investigated.

Recent developments in research into acquisition show how ideas of construction grammar and generative grammar complement each other. This is illustrated with an overview of work on the acquisition of verb second, showing amongst others intriguing differences between early and late acquisition. It is argued that there are no a priori (‘innate’) features or categories but that these are derived based on the available distributional evidence. In particular young learners are able to do so. The features feed a sort and possibly task specific computational system.

The description of bare predicate nouns: a plea for Construction Grammar

Bare nominals in predicate position like artiest in Jan is artiest ‘lit. Jan is artist’ have a capacity meaning, the capacity in this case being a profession. These nominals differ from non-bare nominals (with the indefinite article een) like een artiest in Jan is een artiest ‘Jan is an artist’, which can receive two interpretations: a capacity interpretation and a more figurative one, meaning ‘Jan is an artistic person’. This difference can be accounted for by specifying the constructions in which the nominals appear. The capacity meaning is only available if the bare predicate nominal contains a count noun. There is nevertheless a relation with a corresponding non-count mass noun. While the capacity meaning is always objective, the figurative interpretation of non-bare nominals (with een) is subjective. For this interpretation the article een is a prerequisite. I argue that Construction Grammar offers the best means to describe these facts and is preferable to a generative approach which divides the nouns in the lexicon in capacity and kind nouns and uses type shifting rules and operators to derive the bare and non-bare nominals.

Sentence-medial if-clauses deviate from regular clause-order patterns by their insertion into the main clause, rather than preceding or following it. This phenomenon is analysed in Dutch in terms of semantic domain and syntactic integration.