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- Volume 36, Issue 1, 2019
Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 36, Issue 1, 2019
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GLOW
Author(s): Hans Bennispp.: 2–7 (6)More LessAbstractDuring the first years of my carreer in linguistics, the yearly GLOW-Colloquium was an important event and Dutch linguistics participated in this conference quite substantially. It symbolized the prominent position of theoretical, generative linguistics in the Netherlands in the last decades of the 20th century. The rise of theoretical linguistics cooccurred with my own carreer as a syntactician. In this contribution I compare my experiences of the early days of GLOW with the present state of theoretical linguistics in the Netherlands.
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Posture verbs combined with past participles in Dutch
Author(s): Maarten Bogaardspp.: 67–82 (16)More LessAbstractDutch uses cardinal posture verbs (zitten ‘to sit’, staan ‘to stand’, and liggen ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention – like the posture progressive, e.g. zitten te lezen ‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This paper investigates a posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a past participle, e.g. zitten verstopt ‘lit. sit hidden: to be hidden’. Previous analyses disagree on whether these patterns correspond to a fixed set of combinations, or to a productive schema with semantic restrictions. By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern, this paper evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that the data point strongly at productivity.
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Does reported speech influence listeners’ choice of perspective in the interpretation of spatial prepositions?
Author(s): Ariska I. Bonnema, Vera Hukker and Petra Hendrikspp.: 83–98 (16)More LessAbstractLinguistic cues can encourage adults to adopt an other-centric rather than an egocentric perspective. This study investigated whether the presence of direct speech compared to indirect speech influences listeners’ choice of perspective when interpreting the Dutch spatial prepositions voor ‘in front of’ and achter ‘behind’. Dutch adults and 10 to 12-year-old children were tested in a sentence-picture verification task. Contrary to expectations, we found no difference between direct and indirect speech (Study 1), nor did we find a difference between reported and non-reported speech (Study 2). Most adult listeners adopted the contrasting perspective of the speaker, irrespective of how the information about the reported speech was expressed. We did find a difference between adults and children: children adopted the other person’s perspective less often than adults did. Overall, the results suggest that the mere presence of a reported speaker already is a cue for taking this speaker’s perspective.
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On the idiomatic nature of unproductive morphology
Author(s): Karen De Clercq and Guido Vanden Wyngaerdpp.: 99–114 (16)More LessAbstractWe present a case study in the marking of the negative prefix in French gradable adjectives, where the productive marker iN- alternates with a number of unproductive prefixes, like dé(s)-, dis-, mal-, mé(s)-. We treat this as a classical case of allomorphy, and present an account of the distribution of these allomorphs in terms of the nanosyntactic mechanism of pointers, by which lexical items may point to other, existing, lexical items in the postsyntactic lexicon. We claim that unproductive lexical items are not directly accessible for the spellout mechanism, but only indirectly, via pointers. We show how the analysis accounts for lexicalised semantics in derivations, as well as cases where the formal relationship between derivational pairs is not concatenative, but substitutive.
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Changes in argument structure
Author(s): Gea Dreschlerpp.: 115–129 (15)More LessAbstractEnglish is often contrasted with German and Dutch when it comes to the semantic roles that the subject can express (Hawkins 1986; Los & Dreschler 2012). Specifically, English seems to have more middles (She photographs well) and allows for unusual inanimate subjects (The cottage sleeps four). However, it seems that the semantics of the grammatical subject in Dutch are also changing, as witnessed by recent examples from websites and advertisements, such as Uw fietsenstalling verbetert and Presikhaaf vernieuwt. Although these sentences do not have the adverb that is typical of middles in Dutch (Broekhuis, Corver & Vos 2015: 455ff.), they meet several other requirements for middle formation. In this paper, I analyse examples with one such verb, vernieuwen, and identify two different types of intransitive uses for this predominantly transitive verb. I argue that ambiguity, analogy and genre all play an important role in this change in argument structure.
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Restrictions on “Low” person agreement in Dutch specificational copular constructions
Author(s): Jutta M. Hartmann and Caroline Heycockpp.: 130–146 (17)More LessAbstractAgreement between the verb and its arguments as a predominant phenomenon in language has received major attention in the theoretical literature. One specific aspect under discussion concerns differences between number and person agreement, with the latter being the more restricted one (restricted by Baker’s 2008 SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar & Rezac 2003, or by multiple agreement see Schütze 2003; Ackema & Neeleman 2018). In this paper we address the restrictions on person agreement with a nominative noun phrase in a low position by investigating a relatively little-discussed configuration, namely specificational copular constructions in Dutch such as dat de inspiratie voor deze roman niet jij %bent/??is. We provide data from both a production and a rating study comparing 3/2 person agreement and show that what initially looks like a “person effect” in Dutch turns out to be a pronoun effect.
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A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences
Author(s): Martin Kroon, Sjef Barbiers, Jan Odijk and Stéphanie van der Paspp.: 147–161 (15)More LessAbstractMassive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve “free” translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS-tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results.
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The Perfect in dialogue
Author(s): Bert Le Bruyn, Martijn van der Klis and Henriëtte de Swartpp.: 162–175 (14)More LessAbstractWe investigate the use of the perfect in dialogue in Dutch and – for comparison – report on data from Dutch narrative discourse as well as on data from both registers in English. Our approach is corpus-based with data drawn from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its translation to Dutch. Our data reveal that the Dutch perfect is sensitive to the dialogue/narrative discourse distinction and competes with the past in dialogue along the event/state distinction. This is in line with earlier findings by Boogaart (1999) and de Swart (2007) and lays the foundation for an analysis of the perfect in which we bridge the gap between the English/dialogue oriented literature (Portner 2003; Nishiyama & Koenig 2010) and the variationist/narrative discourse oriented literature (de Swart 2007; Schaden 2009).
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Emphatic reflexives as part-structure modifiers
Author(s): Jos Tellingspp.: 176–191 (16)More LessAbstractThe standard analysis of emphatic reflexives assumes that they are focused expressions of identity in all their uses (e.g. Gast 2006). On the basis of semantic and prosodic data, I argue that exclusive adverbial emphatic reflexives in Dutch and English should instead be analyzed as expressions excluding certain participants from the modified event (“P-exclusives”). The proposed analysis is based on Moltmann’s (2004) account of the part-structure modifier ‘alone’, and avoids a number of problems that the standard analysis has when applied to these data.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 40 (2023)
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Volume 39 (2022)
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Volume 38 (2021)
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Volume 37 (2020)
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Volume 36 (2019)
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Volume 35 (2018)
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Volume 34 (2017)
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Volume 33 (2016)
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Volume 32 (2015)
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Volume 31 (2014)
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Volume 30 (2013)
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Volume 29 (2012)
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Volume 28 (2011)
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Volume 27 (2010)
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Volume 26 (2009)
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Volume 25 (2008)
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Volume 24 (2007)
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Volume 23 (2006)
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Volume 22 (2005)
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Volume 21 (2004)
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Volume 20 (2003)
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Volume 19 (2002)
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Volume 18 (2001)
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Volume 17 (2000)
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Volume 16 (1999)
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Volume 15 (1998)
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Volume 14 (1997)
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Volume 13 (1996)
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Volume 12 (1995)
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Volume 11 (1994)
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Volume 10 (1993)
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Volume 9 (1992)
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Volume 8 (1991)
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