Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 29, Issue 3, 2024

In Dutch sentences like Ik ga verhuizen, zei Jan (‘I am going to move, said John’), the first part contains direct speech, that is followed by the reporting clause zei Jan ‘said John’. The latter is a parenthetical and as such it can also be inserted in the middle of the quote: Ik ga, zei Jan, verhuizen. A remarkable feature of this type of sentences is that the reporting clause starts with subject-verb inversion (zei Jan), which has been explained in previous literature as a consequence of the presence of a quotative operator. In Dutch, this operator can always be replaced by the word zo ‘so’: Ik ga verhuizen, zo zei Jan / Ik ga, zo zei Jan, verhuizen. Contrary to previous accounts, I propose to view zo as a resumptive adverb and the reported direct speech construction as a left dislocation construction, which accounts for the inversion without having to adopt the presence of an underlying operator. Moreover, I argue that the possibility to use zo in the reporting clause indicates that the verbs/predicates in that clause are (used as) ‘spreek’ (speak) verbs. As such they are intransitive, which explains why reporting clauses with obligatory transitive verbs but no object are nonetheless grammatical. The use of these verbs is also the source of the ‘literal’ (demonstrational) character of quoted speech.

This paper examines the semantic structuring of a paradigm of 89 minimizers, i.e., nouns that reinforce sentential negation in present-day Netherlandic Dutch, such as meter ‘meter’ in voor geen meter vertrouwen ‘not to trust for a meter’. Cosine distances are computed on the basis of the predicates the minimizers combine with in a sample of 100 tokens downloaded from the Dutch Web corpus 2014 (nlTenTen14) and clustered according to the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) algorithm into nine semantic clusters. The clusters largely correspond to semantic categories such as taboo terms or units of money. This suggests that, in general, minimizers belonging to the same semantic domain are combined with a similar (core) set of predicates. Based on the shared predicates per cluster, we detect signs of analogical attraction between minimizers or, conversely, competition. Crucially, low silhouette widths enable us to identify outliers in their respective clusters, for instance, minimizing nouns that exhibit signs of context expansion, as shown by their combination with semantically non-harmonious verbs. As such, this paper provides a synchronic snapshot of the semantic processes involved in (incipient) grammaticalization of minimizing nouns and, more in general, it illustrates how distributional semantics offers a heuristic to analyze the structure of a network of comparable micro-constructions.