Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2023

The canonical view on Dutch scrambling in the syntactic literature is that it is subject to information-structural conditions: “new” information is located in a right-peripheral position in the middle field (Jan heeft waarschijnlijk het boek gelezen ‘Jan has probably read the book’) while given information is located in a more leftward position (Jan heeft het boek waarschijnlijk gelezen); see e.g. Verhagen (1986), Neeleman (1994a/b), and Broekhuis (2008). The generally accepted idea that scrambling of “given” definite NP-objects is obligatory was contradicted in Van der Does & De Hoop (1998). Subsequent studies attempted to resolve this intuition conflict through corpus and experimental studies. This article critically reviews these studies and concludes that their results are unsuitable for evaluating the claim made in current generative grammar that object scrambling involves A-movement of the object into its case position (Broekhuis 2009/2020). The article ends with recommendations that can help overcome this shortcoming.

Constructions in which the verb combines with a fixed preposition in many cases have a verb taking a prepositional object (PO). It is often said that the preposition with a PO is very close to meaningless, and therefore arbitrary, but there are reasons to doubt this assertion. This paper aims at exploring the paths followed by prepositional and constructional meaning towards abstraction. For a relevant sample of PO-prepositions, it turns out to be possible to reconstruct the path that connects it to its literal sense, even synchronically. Important gateways to abstraction turn out to be the use of analogy and the shift from literal to figurative meaning.

The present study investigates the effect of interlocutors’ gender on the production of persistent verb spelling errors in adolescents’ private online communication. Specifically, we examine whether boys adapt to the – more standard – spelling practices of girls, and whether girls produce more errors in conversations with boys. We focus on (presumably) unintentional spelling errors in regular Dutch verb forms, i.e., ‘features’ one would rather avoid since they tend to be highly stigmatized. The results reveal a pattern of unilateral accommodation: they point to downward convergence on the part of the older girls, who converge towards the less standard spelling style of their male interlocutors, but not to upward convergence in boys’ writing. The maintenance pattern in boys’ and the norm relaxation in girls’ mixed gender writing give an interesting clue with respect to the subtle mechanisms of both accommodation and norm perception related to the informal social media context.