Anaphoric adjectives becoming determiners

Standard accounts of determiners typically deal with the few well-known elements that fall under this category: articles, demonstratives, possessives and (some) quantifiers. It can be shown, however, that the determiner slot in Dutch can also be occupied by certain elements that do not regularly feature in reference grammars, namely the anaphoric adjectives like voornoemd (“aforementioned”). Their syntax is subject to variation in Present-day Dutch, and possibly to change as well: a corpus study reveals that they are increasingly used as unequivocal determiners, irrespective of their token frequency.

• Affiliations: 1: Research Foundation FWO/University of Leuven