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- Volume 38, Issue 1, 2021
Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 38, Issue 1, 2021
Volume 38, Issue 1, 2021
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The effect of filler complexity and context on the acceptability of wh-island violations in Dutch
Author(s): Maud Beljon, Dennis Joosen, Olaf Koeneman, Bram Ploum, Noëlle Sommer, Peter de Swart and Veerle Wilmspp.: 4–20 (17)More LessAbstractAcceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the complexity of the wh-filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability judgement tasks, we looked at wh-island violations in Dutch by varying the complexity of the filler phrase and by presenting the sentences either in isolation or with a preceding discourse. We found that neither variable had a significant effect in isolation, but that only in their combination a significant effect was observed. The same effect showed up in non-island conditions, however. This is in contrast to findings in the literature on English and French and suggests that the complexity effect in Dutch is not syntactic. We therefore conclude that wh-islands are strong islands in Dutch (Broekhuis & Corver 2015) and show that the contrast with English and French can be made to follow from featural Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 2017), taking into account the verb second property of Dutch.
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The discourse structure of free indirect discourse reports
Author(s): Sofia Bimpikou, Emar Maier and Petra Hendrikspp.: 21–39 (19)More LessAbstractWe investigate the discourse structure of Free Indirect Discourse passages in narratives. We argue that Free Indirect Discourse reports consist of two separate propositional discourse units: an (explicit or implicit) frame segment and a reported content. These segments are connected at the level of discourse structure by a non-veridical, subordinating discourse relation of Attribution, familiar from recent SDRT analyses of indirect discourse constructions in natural conversation (Hunter, 2016). We conducted an experiment to detect the covert presence of a subordinating frame segment based on its effects on pronoun resolution. We compared (unframed) Free Indirect Discourse with overtly framed Indirect Discourse and a non-reportative segment. We found that the first two indeed pattern alike in terms of pronoun resolution, which we take as evidence against the pragmatic context split approach of Schlenker (2004) and Eckardt (2014), and in favor of our discourse structural Attribution analysis.
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Are Dutch posture verbs lexical or functional elements?
Author(s): Iris Mulderspp.: 40–64 (25)More LessAbstractIn Dutch, posture verbs like liggen ‘lie’ and staan ‘stand’ are obligatorily used in locative constructions with inanimate subjects, classifying the spatial Figure-Ground relation. Prima facie, in this use, posture verbs seem more like functional elements than like lexical verbs.
This paper investigates processing of Dutch posture verbs in a reference resolution task in the visual world paradigm, to get more clarity on the nature of these verbs. We know that lexical verbs like rinkelen ‘ring’ cause anticipatory looks towards a matching target referent like telefoon ‘telephone’; and that they suppress looks to a phonological competitor like telescoop ‘telescope’. The functional property of grammatical gender on determiners (de vs. het) is less robust in directing looks. When it comes to anticipating the target referent, and suppressing looks to a phonological competitor, do posture verbs pattern with lexical verbs, or with functional elements like grammatical gender?
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Going city
Author(s): Gert-Jan Schoenmakers and John David Stormentpp.: 65–80 (16)More LessAbstractIn certain varieties of Dutch spoken among young people, the preposition and determiner in locative and directional PPs can sometimes be omitted. We argue on the basis of language data taken from Twitter and intuitions of young speakers of Dutch that nominal arguments in these constructions do not have a DP layer, the absence of which leads to a special interpretation. The option to omit the preposition is related to the structural and semantic complexity of the verb. The bare construction is possible only with simple verbs, and not with manner-of-motion verbs. We present an analysis that accounts for the non-pronunciation of prepositions in directional predicates by claiming that they can be licensed through incorporation into the verb. This type of incorporation is blocked if the verb is structurally complex.
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Strange nominative case in topicalized object pronominal relative clauses
Author(s): Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Theresa Redl and Helen de Hooppp.: 81–97 (17)More LessAbstractIn an online production experiment, we investigated the effect of sentence position on the preference for either a nominative or object form of an object pronoun restricted by a relative clause in Dutch. Results show a significant preference for the nominative form of the restricted object pronoun in sentence-initial position as it was chosen in 95% of the cases. In the original object position this percentage is only 20%. The preference for a nominative pronominal object is considered a grammatical norm violation. We account for this in terms of a combination of two factors. First, the presence of the relative clause makes the object ‘long’. Second, the sentence-initial position is a syntactic position that is relatively far removed from the original object position. We argue that when a long object is topicalized, there are too many intervening elements between the pronoun and the verb of which it is the complement. If the distance between the pronominal object and the verb has become too long, the object case fades from the working memory. This then results in the appearance of nominative case as the default case for topicalized object pronominal relative clauses in Dutch.
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Temporal adverbial superlatives in Dutch
Author(s): Jos Tellingspp.: 98–113 (16)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates adverbial superlative expressions in Dutch that have a temporal interpretation, i.e. that contain the forms eerst ‘first’, laatst ‘latest’, and vroegst ‘earliest’. I focus on possessive superlatives and superlatives embedded under the preposition voor. Although both constructions contain bare superlatives and are interpreted temporally, they represent semantically and pragmatically different readings, and attach to the sentence in structurally different ways. I present a semantic analysis of both types of superlatives, and I show what this entails for how time adverbials interact with superlatives.
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French as a foreign language in the Netherlands
Author(s): Evi van Tessel and Marco Brilpp.: 114–127 (14)More LessAbstractExposure to English is more extensive in today’s society than to French. In this study we investigated crosslinguistic influences from Dutch and/or English to language performances in French as a foreign language, while controlling for language proficiency in French, English and Dutch, and exposure to English.
We tested Dutch learners of French (n = 65) with respect to the acceptability of reduced relative clauses and attachment preferences in full relative clauses. The results showed crosslinguistic influence in the acceptability task and the preference task from English and Dutch respectively. Furthermore, language proficiency in English seems to affect attachment preferences in French. We concluded that these findings support the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al. 2017) and that French in Dutch secondary education might be a third language, instead of a second language.
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The productivity of Dutch diminutives
Author(s): Rosita van Tuijl and Peter Coopmanspp.: 128–143 (16)More LessAbstractThis study reports on an investigation of the productivity of the Dutch diminutive paradigm, which gives rise to five suffixal allomorphs, against the background of Yang’s (2016) Tolerance Principle. It shows how, by studying the frequency of the allomorphs and the environments in which they occur, we can use the Tolerance Principle to determine if a productive rule system can be found for the Dutch diminutives. In doing so, we also describe how we collected the necessary data by setting up a corpus study on Dutch diminutives, including a specific one with data from child directed speech.
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Taking the perspective of narrative characters
Author(s): Jorrig Vogels, Sofia Bimpikou, Owen Kapelle and Emar Maierpp.: 144–162 (19)More LessAbstractAn ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and whether different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect how and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating which objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.
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‘Between’ constructions in Biblical Hebrew
Author(s): Joost Zwartspp.: 163–178 (16)More LessAbstractUnlike its English counterpart between, the Biblical Hebrew (BH) preposition bên does not allow a conjoined object (between A and B), but it uses additional prepositions in two typologically unusual patterns: bên A wə-bên B ‘between A and-between B’ and bên A lə-B ‘between A to-B’. This article shows that these two patterns, and their equivalence with the English one, can be accounted for semantically, on the basis of the underlying filter behaviour of the ‘betweenness’ meaning.
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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