Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 39, Issue 1, 2022

This paper presents a novel syntactic analysis of the much-debated Dutch aanhet-construction, e.g. Pieter is aan het opruimen ‘lit. Peter is on the cleanup: Peter is cleaning up’. We show that the construction’s syntactic behavior varies with the matrix verb: progressive zijn ‘be’ versus ingressive gaan ‘go’ and slaan ‘hit’. Based on this variation, we argue that there are two aanhet-projections occupying different synchronic positions on a functional-to-lexical cline.

So far, processing studies on grammatical norm violations (GNVs) in Dutch (i.e. als ‘as’ in comparatives) have mainly focused on general differences between GNVs and their grammatical and ungrammatical counterparts. The present study is the first to also systematically investigate between-participant and between-construction variation in the processing of GNVs, using a self-paced reading task. Age and educational level were investigated as potential sources of between-participant variation, and between-construction variation was assessed by including three GNVs that vary in the amount of prescriptive attention they receive in society. Results indeed showed that the processing of GNVs was influenced by the age and educational level of participants. Moreover, different results were obtained for different norm violations. Based on these results, we conclude that it is very important to take into account differences between participants and constructions when studying the processing of GNVs.

In Netherlandish Dutch, Belgian Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, speakers have a choice between formal (V) and informal (T) pronouns of address. We present a quantitative study of how V and T are used on recruitment pages of multinational companies. Our corpus-based method is inspired by studies on pronouns of address in Netherlandish and Belgian Dutch by Vismans (2007) and Waterlot (2014). Unlike these earlier studies, we provide a comparison of the same companies recruiting in different countries, thereby strengthening the comparison of V- and T-forms between languages. We find a preference for T in recruitment ads in Belgian Dutch, Netherlandish Dutch, and Spanish, while we find a preference for V in French. There seems to be no clear preference for either V or T in German, which may reflect that address preferences in German are changing or ambiguous.

How do people understand figurative speech in a foreign language? What strategies do they use? By means of an online questionnaire, this study investigated to what extent contextual information and transfer play a role in the interpretation of idioms in a second language, controlling for familiarity. Sixty-one native speakers of Dutch were asked to guess the correct interpretation of English idioms with and without a Dutch equivalent, presented with and without context, out of four answer options. The results showed that correctly interpreting an idiom depends on both the presence of context and the possibility of transfer. More correct interpretations were given when an idiom was presented in a context, but only for English idioms without an equivalent in the native language. English idioms with an equivalent in Dutch, often rated as familiar, were mostly understood correctly. We interpret this result as the involvement of transfer from the native language.

Slurs are pejorative terms for groups of people, relating to for example their nationality, their sexual orientation, etc. While there is a lot of discussion about slurs, they are typically characterized in relation to a neutral noun. In this article we will explore this distinction between neutral and offensive group labels. By means of a small experiment, we show that slurs are indeed considered to be more hurtful than their corresponding ‘neutral’ nouns, but that at least some of these nouns themselves are experienced as more hurtful than adjective noun combinations. We suggest that the results are in line with analyses in which the degree to which a term is considered to be hurtful is based on its inherent (i.e. conventionalized) properties, as well as the context in which it is used. We suggest that such analyses could be extended to nouns, such that terms can be neutral or non-neutral to various degrees.

In this article we conduct a pragmatic analysis of the Dutch utterance-final particle hoor (lit. ‘hear’). Apparently, hoor has contradictory uses. It ex-presses politeness (involvement, togetherness), but it can also contribute to the face-threatening force of an utterance. We argue that there is a core meaning that all uses share, which is that by adding hoor, speakers claim a proposition at issue to be part of the common ground. This core meaning will be shown to account for hoor’s key characteristics. Hoor expresses involvement and is often attached to speech acts that are intrinsically polite, such as apologizing and giving compliments. Also, while hoor never occurs in interrogative sentences, it can be used with a certain type of directive speech acts, namely those that are in the interest of the hearer or are presented as having shared interests.

Expressing syllable weight by moras leads to two problems. First, there are languages, such as Wolof, with long vowels and geminates, which both make a syllable bimoraic, but where only long vowels, but not geminates, count as heavy for stress. Second, there are languages in which closed syllables are light for stress, but heavy for segmental modifications (laryngeal metathesis in Cayuga and degemination in Chugach Alutiiq). It is argued that a two-layered mora model is not required and that a straightforward Harmonic Serialism is able to directly express that laryngeal metathesis and degemination make an unstressed syllable light.

This study sets out to investigate the insubordinated infinitive in the Bantu language Makhuwa-Enahara (P31, northern Mozambique), which is used with feeling predicates that have passive experiencers. The expression of bodily feelings and emotions in Makhuwa serves as a foundation, highlighting the unique formal and interpretational properties of the insubordinated infinitive within the domain of feelings.

In French, the noun apple (la pomme) is grammatically feminine, in German (der Apfel) it is masculine. Does this entail that French speakers perceive apples to be feminine whereas German speakers attribute masculine characteristics to them? Various studies suggest that grammatical gender does indeed influence object perception (Haertlé 2017; Boroditsky & Schmidt 2000), although findings are not always replicated (Bender et al. 2011). The current study investigates this phenomenon for Polish, an understudied language in this domain, and German, a language for which contradictory results have been obtained. We investigated whether Polish (N = 21) and German (N = 27) speakers follow the grammatical gender of an object when providing a first name for it (e.g. James or Maya). Results suggest that while Polish speakers provided names that were in accordance with the object’s grammatical gender, German speakers did not. Cross-linguistic differences between these two languages (regarding noun transparency) may explain these findings.

Conditional clauses in Dutch can be accompanied by focus particles, as in zelfs als ‘even if’ and alleen als ‘only if’. The literature focuses on these additive and restrictive particles, because they may influence the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence, which is uncommon for particles. Most of these studies are not based on empirical language data, or draw largely from formal written texts in English. This study investigates which focus particles occur in Dutch conditionals, and to which extent their uses are associated with spoken and written modes and with formal and informal registers. It is shown that restrictive and additive particles are most frequent in formal written texts, and that a third type of particle exists, which adds iterative meaning to the conditional, as in telkens als ‘everytime if [when]’. The results show this type of particles to be associated with informal spoken texts.

In this paper, we investigate whether non-native speakers of Dutch use the interpersonal discourse particle eigenlijk differently than native speakers of Dutch. Particles such as eigenlijk are considered to be very difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Eigenlijk might be even more difficult to learn than other particles, because of its complex effect on the discourse. We tested whether non-native speakers of Dutch used eigenlijk differently than native speakers of Dutch by means of an online cloze test in which native speakers (control group, N = 109) and non-native speakers (N = 73) had to choose between eigenlijk and an adverb in a variety of contexts. Results indicated that non-native speakers used eigenlijk differently than native speakers, but non-native speakers did somewhat understand that eigenlijk marks a contrast with a contextually raised expectation. Moreover, more proficient native speakers were more similar to native speakers in their use of eigenlijk than less proficient native speakers.

While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The construction was most frequent with descending and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e. terms with a non-kin meaning at least as prominent as kinship use; Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm 2001: 202). These findings were explained by pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the construction creates.

Syntactic decomposition theories of argument structure take predicates to be syntactically complex, consisting of a root and one or more functional heads. Traditionally, these functional heads have been used as potential attachment sites for adverbs, such as the repetitive adverb again, giving rise to the repetitive/restitutive ambiguity. In this paper, I question the assumption that these functional heads provide sublexical attachment sites based on theoretical and empirical objections. Taking both the scope of the adverb and effects of focus into account, I present a supralexical approach to the ambiguity. Discussing novel data of two Dutch repetitive adverbs as well as a repetitive verbal prefix, I argue that again has a default restitutive reading that becomes repetitive if the adverb scopes over the object or if focus is placed on the adverb. This research has implications for syntactic decomposition approaches to argument structure.

Deictic co-speech gestures (DCSGs) are commonly regarded as intimately related to exophoric demonstrative forms; yet, no account is available that formalises this relation. This paper proposes that DCSGs spell-out part of the internal structure of exophoric demonstratives: concretely, they contribute the spatial coordinates (direction and distance, syntactically encoded by the Demonstrative ‘Dem’ head and by a Measure Phrase ‘MeasP’ that modifies it, respectively) that identify the location of the demonstrative’s referent and the deictic centre. This naturally captures the intuition that exophoric demonstratives and DCSGs are related, under a multi-modal spell-out approach to demonstrative forms. Further, this proposal is compatible with independent facts regarding both the grammaticalisation of demonstrative forms and their acquisition.

There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking, through suffixation, and through prefixation. We focus on prefixed deadjectival verbs, contrasting two views. According to the first view, prefixed verbs are left-headed: the prefix is responsible for the change in category, i.e. [V ver [A breed]]. The second view holds that prefixed verbs are right-headed, and involve a zero verbalizing suffix, i.e. [V ver [V [A breed] ∅]]. We argue in this paper for a mixed, nanosyntactic, approach. We adopt Ramchand’s (2008) decomposition of the verb and argue that the prefix spells out part of the verbal structure and the verbal root spells out another part.

There are two comparative suffixes in Ukrainian: the productive -iš, and the non-productive -š. Following Caha et al. (2019) I show that just like in Czech, the distribution of these two suffixes in Ukrainian is regulated not by phonology, but by morphosyntax. The theory of Nanosyntax (Starke 2009) is used in order to account for the data. The comparative meaning is represented in syntax not by one but by two functional heads. To be more precise, I propose that in Ukrainian -iš is decomposed into two morphemes -i and -š, where -i spells out the lower head and -š spells out the higher one. The issue of suppletive adjectives is discussed as well. I argue that suppletion can be accounted for using the nanosyntactic concept of pointers. As a result, this approach helps to explain the mechanism behind allomorphy of the comparative suffix in regular and suppletive adjectives in Ukrainian.

Second language acquisition often involves the acquisition of stable patterns in a target language. Here we investigate how the acquisition of a variable pronunciation pattern, viz. the pronunciation of the semisuffix -man in professional names in English (e.g. policeman, businessman) is related to the lexical frequency of the words concerned. The pronunciation of this suffix varies between a full vowel and a reduced one in a lexically unpredictable manner (i.e. some words with -man tend to have schwa, others a full vowel, and still others vary between the two). To test how the pronunciation of such words is acquired in a second language, we carried out a picture naming experiment in which Chinese subjects were asked to pronounce them. The results show that the pronunciation of this semisuffix is especially related to the educational status of subjects (major vs. non-major).