Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2017

German, Dutch and English have surprisingly large sets of verbal diminutives: verbs ending in -el/-le and carrying an attenuative and/or iterative meaning. These verbs exhibit particular properties that make them interesting for morphological theory. Focussing on Dutch data, this paper sketches the challenges that arise with respect to structure, productivity and meaning, and proposes a constructionist account that allows for a better understanding of the issues. The central notion is the schema, a generalization over the structure of complex words. In contrast to rules, whose main function is to generate new words, schemas motivate existing words by marking their structure as non-arbitrary. We discuss the modelling options this gives us and apply them to the verbal diminutives.

This paper discusses the two types of infinitives in Frisian: infinitives ending in -E (e.g. rinne “walk”) and infinitives ending in -EN (e.g. rinnen “walk”). It shows that their distribution can be accounted for by their different underlying syntactic structure: the -E infinitive has a fully verbal structure whereas the -EN infinitive has a flexible structure which always involves a DP. Moreover, I argue that the fact that the difference between the two forms is disappearing can be explained both by Dutch influence and by the fact that the structure of the infinitives already showed much overlap.

This paper aims at describing Q(uantity)-words, i.e. many/much and few/little, from a typological perspective, and presenting typological generalisations based on it. The typological sample provides support for a mass-count and positive-negative dimension in the domain of Q-words. Both dimensions also intersect. Along the negative dimension, it seems that languages fall into two groups: those having an opaque strategy for few/little and those having only an analytic strategy (not-much/many). Four patterns can be discerned on the basis of the sample, which are each exemplified by means of one language, i.e. English, Dutch, Wolof and Western Armenian. In addition, I make an attempt at developing a nanosyntactic analysis of the data, which aims to show how language variation in the domain of Q-words can be accounted for in terms of varying the size of lexically stored trees ( Starke 2014 ). Finally, I show how one missing type of pattern is underivable on the basis of the analysis proposed.

The Austronesian languages of Flores-Lembata in eastern Indonesia show all three stages of a Jespersen Cycle: some have a negator in pre-predicate position, others in clause-final position, and yet others have embracing double negation. In this article the various negation patterns in the Flores-Lembata languages are described using a sample of nine closely related languages of the region. It examines not only the negative constructions but also the etymology of the negators used, showing historical connections between some of the languages, as well as independent developments in others. On the basis of cross-linguistic evidence, and taking into account the non-Austronesian (Papuan) structures found in these Flores-Lembata languages, it is argued that the clause-final negation in several of these languages was caused by contact with speakers of Papuan languages during an earlier stage.

Spatial prepositions express relations between objects in space. A subset of spatial prepositions is ambiguous due to the different perspectives from which these spatial relations can be considered. The ability to consider another person’s perspective is still developing in children. This study investigates how Dutch-speaking children (mean age 10) and adults interpret perspective-dependent spatial prepositions uttered by a speaker. We found that adults took the speaker’s perspective in a third of the cases, whereas children did so in a sixth of the cases. No differences in interpretation emerged between prepositions in assertions and requests, although these different speech acts reflect different speaker intentions. In general, children performed like adults, but less often took the speaker’s perspective with naast compared to voor and achter in assertions. We conclude that 10-year-olds can take another person’s perspective when interpreting spatial prepositions, but, like adults, only do so in a minority of cases.

The general perspective of the paper is that all (dis)harmonic branching orders within the West-Germanic V-clusters imply a different categorization by the acquisition procedure that should be independently motivated. More specific, the paper discusses the directionality switch with the temporal auxiliary het (‘have’) in Afrikaans. Afrikaans has a right-branching V-cluster 1-2-3. The directionality switches in subordinate clauses when V1 is the auxiliary het, which seemingly gives rise to the a-typical order 2-3-1 [[leer 2 swem 3] het 1]. V2 is in this case an IPP (Infinitivus-pro-participio) infinitive. I propose to derive the directionality switch as a matter of category assignment by an acquisition procedure that is unaware of underlying structure followed by movements. I argue that sentence-final het has been reanalyzed as a morphological suffix on the V3. This leads to a simplification of the apparent 2-3-1 V-cluster into a binary 1–2 V-cluster [leer 1 [swem het]2].

Many acquisition studies indicate that across languages, children overgenerate definite articles in indefinite contexts. However, proportions and ages at which children make this error vary, and so do theoretical accounts. Attempting to resolve some of the mixed results, we combined the methods of two different studies ( Schaeffer & Matthewson 2005 (SM) and van Hout, Harrigan & de Villiers 2010 (HHV)) and administered them to one group of 82 Dutch-acquiring children aged 2–9 and adult controls (N = 23). 1 The results show that definite article overuse takes place in (a) only the youngest age group (2;1–3;7) in the relevant SM indefinite condition, (b) only the two oldest child groups (6;0–9;4) in the HHV indefinite condition, and (c) adults score at ceiling in the SM conditions, while only around 70% correct in the HHV conditions. We argue that (a) the indefinite conditions of the two article choice experiments test different types of knowledge, and therefore their results cannot be compared, (b) the HHV task has more methodological drawbacks than the SM task, rendering its results difficult to interpret, and (c) the results provide less evidence for HHV’s unranked-constraint hypothesis than for SM’s lack-of-Concept-of-Non-Shared-Assumptions hypothesis.

This paper demonstrates the diachronic development of the Dutch gustatory verbs proeven and smaken and the semantic encroachment of the former on the meanings covered by the latter, and explains the current use of proeven in constructions in which smaken is expected (i.e. De soep proeft lekker ‘the soup tastes good’). This spread of the use of proeven (and the consequential increasingly limited use of smaken) can be explained by metaphorization and is analyzed as the result of lexical paradigm levelling. 1

In contrast to finite verb clusters, non-finite verb clusters have thus far received little attention in the literature. In this paper, I present new data from a large-scale questionnaire study on variation in non-finite three-verb clusters in Dutch, investigating the position and presence of the infinitival marker te ‘to’. The results reveal that a group of Dutch speakers allows te to occur in a higher position than it should based on selection requirements. I propose that for these speakers te has the morphosyntactic status of a clitic, whereas for all other speakers te is a verbal prefix. I analyse Dutch verb clusters as cases of functional restructuring and te-raising as an instance of clitic climbing, a well-known phenomenon from other languages with restructuring, such as Italian.

Children acquire the meaning of ook ‘also’ in Dutch relatively late ( Bergsma 2006 ), although this focus particle is highly frequent. We argue that this late acquisition is caused by a pragmatic rule: contrastive implicature. We follow Sæbø (2004) , who argues that additives are used because without them, the sentences they appear in would be interpreted as contrastive in relation to the context. Data from a sentence completion task administered to Dutch L1 learners (N = 62, ages 4;0–5;11) show that, on average, four-year-olds do not distinguish sentences with ook from sentences without ook. Five-year-olds do better on sentences with ook but worse on sentences without it. We argue that they have generally acquired contrastive implicature: they apply the correct contrastive interpretation to sentences without ook, but overgeneralize this implicature to sentences with ook, before completely acquiring the meaning of ook.