Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 37, Issue 1, 2020

Distributive-share markers such as jeweils in German or po in Serbian allow for event-distributive readings, where events are distributed over spatio-temporal units, unlike distributive quantifiers such as each in English that only allow individual-distributive readings. Some researchers propose that German jeweils should be analyzed as a universal event-distributive quantifier. In contrast, other researchers claim distributive share markers (e.g. Serbian po) are simply event plurality markers. We investigated these claims with jeweils in two experiments. Experiment 1 tested if both individual and spatial (event) distributive readings are readily available for transitive sentences in German, and if there is an exhaustivity requirement on the restrictor argument. Experiment 2 was designed to force event-distributive readings and further disambiguate the results from Experiment 1. Our findings suggest that jeweils seems to be a true universal event quantifier, and highlight that distributive share markers can differ in fundamental features cross-linguistically.

This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A′-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of clausal ellipsis; it claims that clausal ellipsis can apply to any run-of-the-mill syntactic structure and simply deletes the familiar/given information from the propositional domain of the clause. Another alternative is the selective spell-out approach; it denies the involvement of deletion and states that the remnants undergo regular A′-movement into the specifiers of specific semantically relevant functional projections (CP, FocusP, NegP, etc.), which are subsequently selected for spell-out. This article argues that the selective spell-out approach is superior to the two deletion approaches.

Incremental comprehension of head-final constructions can reveal structural attachment preferences for ambiguous phrases. This study investigates how temporarily ambiguous PPs are processed in Dutch verb-final constructions. In De aannemer heeft op het dakterras bespaard/gewerkt ‘The contractor has on the roof terrace saved/worked’, the PP is locally ambiguous between attachment as argument and as adjunct. This ambiguity is resolved by the sentence-final verb. In a self-paced reading task, we manipulated the argument/adjunct status of the PP, and its position relative to the verb. While we found no reading-time differences between argument and adjunct PPs, we did find that transitive verbs, for which the PP is an argument, were read more slowly than intransitive verbs, for which the PP is an adjunct. We suggest that Dutch parsers have a preference for adjunct attachment of preverbal PPs, and discuss our findings in terms of incremental parsing models that aim to minimize costly reanalysis.

Sentences with plural expressions are compatible with distributive and collective interpretations. Adults generally prefer collective interpretations, whereas children do not. Dotlačil (2010) argues that the adult collective preference arises via an implicature. Adults can reason about alternative utterances with the distributive marker each, thereby ruling out distributive interpretations in favor of collective interpretations. Experiment 1 used the covered-box paradigm to investigate whether adults and children make the comparisons predicted by Dotlačil’s implicature account. Adults’ responses suggest that they made comparisons with internally generated alternatives, supporting the implicature account. Moreover, children seem to do so from around 11 years old onwards, after they have learned the distributive character of each. Experiment 2 excluded the possibility that our results in Experiment 1 were influenced by participants’ exposure to both collective and distributive pictures, making the collective interpretation more salient. Both experiments thus point towards an implicature underlying the adult collective preference.

The association between sentential negation and tense has solid foundations in the literature. It has even been argued that sentential negative markers consist of a Tense feature (De Clercq 2018, 2020). This paper adduces the first results from a typological study and data from Bambara in support of this claim. In addition, the Bambara data also point to the morphological realisation of present or default tense, to a hierarchy for tense and to a position for sentential negation in that hierarchy.

The paper investigates the origin, the development, the semantics and the pragmatics of the temporal use of the Dutch expression goed en wel ‘good and well’. We argue that the expression has developed from a meaning “safe and sound” into an indicator of the end of a preparatory phase or transition period, as well as a marker of the beginning of a new state. We observe that temporal goed en wel always requires a secondary state of affairs that is temporally related to the transition point initiating the primary state of affairs, and we show that the expression is increasingly being employed for rhetorical purposes.

This paper presents an analysis of a Palestinian Arabic negation-associated exclusive construction featuring the contrastive focus marker illa ‘but’, with theoretical implications for the syntax of negation, negative polarity item licensing, and the categorical status of the root in sentential syntax. It analyzes illa-phrases as constituents licensed by a c-commanding sentential negation (Neg), and illa as a grammatical device encoding contrastiveness. A crucial source for the exclusive semantics of the construction comes from a silent bass ‘only’ immediately following illa that constitutes a syntactic ‘shield’ against Neg scope. Rather than taking an in-situ focus-interpretation approach (cf. Rooth 1985, 1992), we argue for two covert movements at the syntax-semantics interface: quantifier raising of illa-phrases to the designated specifier of polarity Phrase followed by Polarity-to-Focus-raising of Neg. This creates the right syntactic configuration for the truth conditional import of both operators and captures the ‘classical’ thought that focus-sensitive exclusive operators like only quantify over propositional alternatives.

Conditional clauses in Dutch can occur in sentence-initial and sentence-final position. For sentence-initial conditionals, a number of syntactic integration patterns are available. This corpus study investigates to what extent clause order and syntactic integration are associated with text mode (spoken, written) and register (formal, informal). Sentence-initial position of the conditional clause is shown to be most frequent in both modes and registers, although sentence-final position is more frequent than one would expect based on the literature, especially in written texts. The distribution of syntactic integration patterns shows a clear difference between modes, as full integration of the conditional clause into the main clause is most frequent in written texts, whereas the use of the resumptive element dan (‘then’) is most frequent in spoken texts.

The Dutch expression goed en wel ‘good and well’ is polysemous. In one of its uses, goed en wel combines with a universal quantifier alles or allemaal ‘all’ and the conjunction maar ‘but’. The resulting construction is typically used to introduce a contrary reaction to an earlier utterance or suggestion. The combination is shown to fit into a larger class of pragmatic operators, which are argued to be instances of lexicalized pragmatics.

This paper discusses two types of discourse-related V1 declaratives in Dutch. The first type involves a missing argument. In the position before the finite verb a referential 3rd person pronoun is deleted. The deletion of the pronoun is constrained by the recoverability condition, which requires that its referential features can be reconstructed from context. I will argue that only the deletion of a d(emonstrative)-pronoun is “topic drop”. Deleted topic d-pronouns are subject to the same syntactic conditions as overt topic d-pronouns. Like the overt d-pronoun, the deleted d-pronoun refers to the focus constituent of the preceding sentence. A deleted p(ersonal)-pronoun, by contrast, does not have a uniquely determined antecedent. The second type of V1 declarative is found in so-called “narrative inversion” in which all arguments are present, and no empty element needs to be postulated. Various types of narrative inversion and the kind of discourse relation they imply are discussed.

A major debate in psycholinguistics concerns the representation of morphological structure in the mental lexicon. We report the results of an auditory primed lexical decision experiment in which we tested whether verbs prime their nominalizations in Dutch. We find morphological priming effects with regular nominalizations (schorsen ‘suspend’ → schorsing ‘suspension’) as well as with irregular nominalizations (schieten ‘shoot’ → schot ‘shot’). On this basis, we claim that, despite the lack of phonological identity between stem and derivation in the case of irregular nominalizations, the morphological relation between the two forms, suffices to evoke a priming effect. However, an alternative explanation, according to which the semantic relation in combination with the phonological overlap accounts for the priming effect, cannot be excluded.