Nota Bene - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2025

In het vijfenzeventigste jaar van het bestaan van de Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap (AVT) waait er een fascistische wind in Nederland. Universiteiten gehoorzamen bij voorbaat door gedwee te bezuinigen en onderwijsprogramma’s te vernederlandsen. De taalwetenschap blijft “een hoeveelheid nutteloze beschaving waarvoor zo weinig mogelijk geld beschikbaar kan worden gesteld” (zoals voorzitter Stutterheim schreef in 1952). Misschien wel daarom belichaamt ze ook de onafhankelijkheid van denken en doen die we in deze tijd hard nodig hebben. Dit commentaar is een versie van de afscheidsrede van Mark Dingemanse, AVT-voorzitter 2022–2025.

This paper explores an instance of prosodic augmentation (Lovick 2023: 382) via devoicing in Mẽbêngôkre, a Jê language spoken in Brazilian Amazonia. While segment lengthening is usually associated with prosodic augmentation, in Mẽbêngôkre high vowels can be devoiced, besides also lengthened, to express intensity. While all vowel segments in Mẽbêngôkre can be lengthened for expressive means, only high vowels /i ɨ u/ can be both lengthened and devoiced. This talk contributes to studies on expressiveness and iconicity in language by showing that vowel devoicing can also be targeted by prosodic augmentation.

The status of hesitation markers or filled pauses (e.g., eh, uhm) is debated, with some claiming that these forms merely signal disfluencies or delays in conversation, while others argue that they are lexical items. Although more common in oral communication, hesitation markers have been attested in written communication too, such as in tweets. Due to the nature of written language, hesitation markers in tweets must be intentionally produced; it follows that they fulfill a pragmatic function. However, not much is known yet about these pragmatic functions. We qualitatively explore the functions of hesitation markers in a corpus of Dutch and Spanish tweets. We not only show that they have a clear pragmatic function, but also that they can have a clear interactive and intersubjective function, in that they comment on the content of the contribution of their interlocutor and how this content conflicts with assumed common knowledge.

Different Dutch manner adverbials exhibit different syntactic behaviour in embedded clauses (1); given accounts of the supposed cross-linguistic uniformity of manner adverbials as adpositional phrases, this comes as a surprise.

• (1) 

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  …dat	Reinder	het	parcours	<	op	deze	manier	/	te	voet>	aflegt .
  …that	R.	the	course		on	this	manner	/	on	foot	traverses

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  ‘…that Reinder is traversing the course in this way/on foot.’

I argue non-uniform distribution of Dutch manner adverbial PPs is related to differences in their internal structure; lightness of the nominal complement embedded in them is shown to affect the structure of PP, which in turn affects how they distribute. With Collins (2007) and Koster (1994), I argue light PPs, as complements of the verb, must move away from sentence-final position, while non-light PPs do so optionally, deriving the observed distributional disparity between MAs.

A common type of split ergativity is conditioned by tense and/or aspect in that an ergative-absolutive system occurs in the past tense or perfective aspect and a nominative-accusative system occurs in the non-past tense(s) or imperfective aspect (DeLancey 1982, Payne 2006). This finding, however, pertains to case marking only. Using a genetically diverse typological sample on conditional argument indexing in 83 languages (Walker 2024, Walker & Van Lier under review), the present study explores if a similar tendency can be found for indexing. Within the database, 22 languages display indexing conditioned by TAM (tense, aspect, mood) factors. Across 17 languages, a clear trend regarding aspect and indexing was found: imperfective, progressive, and non-completive aspect condition a nominative-accusative system while perfective, terminative, and completive aspect condition an ergative-absolutive system. For tense and mood, however, no such clear relationship was found. For the remaining 5 languages, the TAM split applied to a specific person/number value only. We conclude that for aspect, but not for tense and mood, our findings correspond with previous literature on split-ergativity in case marking.

This article discusses some aspects of the historical and contemporaneous context of the 19th-century discovery of language centers in the human brain by the neurologists Broca and Wernicke. The first part deals with (1) earlier theorizing about the bodily locus of mental faculties and about the nature of aphasic disorders, and (2) the 19th-century emergence of research facilities in large hospitals. Together, these developments enabled successful aphasia-based search for language centers. Its main result, the Broca-Wernicke model, soon acquired benchmark status, but was never uncontroversial.

The article’s second part discusses the remarkable disconnectedness of 19th-century neurology/aphasiology and 19th-century linguistics. In recent historiography, several plausible factors have been mentioned to explain this regrettable lack of contact. The suggestion that the neurologists’ neglect of syntax could have been prevented by a rapprochement with contemporaneous linguistics has to be rejected, however.

The study reported in this article investigates the phenomenon of the posterior past in Dutch, where the preterite refers to present or future eventualities, challenging traditional tense-aspect (TA) analysis. Building on the work of Haans and de Hoop (2023), this study offers a reanalysis of this feature using Klein’s (1994) and Bohnemeyer’s (1998, 2014) TA framework, using data from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. Furthermore, parallels and distinctions in the cross-linguistic variation on the posterior past are highlighted. The findings show that the temporal reference of the posterior past is real, which reflects its definition by Reichenbach (1947) and becomes clear when analysed through the Kleinian framework. This research provides insights into the interaction between tense, aspect and modality, contributing to broader linguistic theory.

The present work utilises Grambank data about 1943 languages to look at two features of omnipredicativity — lack of copula and argument indexing. Methodologically, it successfully replicates the phylogenetic and areal bias controls outlined by Guzmán Naranjo & Becker (2021) so Bayesian statistics can evaluate the presence of an effect. Via this route, I find no effect of a lack of bound subject-indexing on copula use in predicate nominals. However, there are some important takeaways for future omnipredicativity research and the use of big-database typological data. Future inquiries into omnipredicativity would benefit from a multivariate approach to variables such as degrees of boundedness of S-indexes, degrees of overlap of S-indexing systems for nouns and verbs, and degrees of copula use in predicate nominals. However, this is not easily possible when using predominantly binary Grambank data. I also found that copula use in nominal predication seems to be an areal feature.

The accent patterns of Turkish have been analyzed in various ways, yet there is still no consensus on their prosodic structure. Focusing on constructions with suffixes, clitics, and auxiliaries, we examine the extent to which the accent patterns must be lexically specified, and how to best represent them. It is shown that the accent patterns are predictable for clitics, mostly predictable for auxiliaries, and less predictable for suffixes. A grid-based approach that encodes ‘accent’ and ‘(un)accentability’ separately is proposed to analyze both the predictable and the unpredictable patterns in a unified way.

Coaching is a fast-growing learning and development format. While its overall effectiveness is empirically established in psychological research, there is little linguistic research on how particular discursive practices are used in coaching interactions to co-construct such effectiveness. This paper focusses on modal particles and investigates their use in workplace coaching in German. Drawing on four coaching processes from the QueSCo corpus, it specifically analyses coaches’ particle use across various sentence types. Results show that coaches construct themselves as neutral process managers by using particular modal particles: in questions, they mainly use the most neutral particles denn and eigentlich, in orders, they mainly use softening particles such as mal, and in declaratives, particles such as ja that mark common ground dominate.

Nimwèègs, a variety of Cleverlandish spoken in Nijmegen, has been subject to extensive sociolinguistic inquiry. Today, most remaining speakers reside in the so-called Onderstad and are active in the building of a new linguistic identity with the organization of cultural events, alongside the promotion of the local football team (N.E.C.). In this study, we focus on the social motivations behind the use of Nimwèègs in this community. We conducted linguistic fieldwork and collected Frog Story narrations with 14 participants using the MPI Fieldkit. We identified 24 variables, based on previous studies (Berns 2002; van Hout 1989; van Hout, Roelofs & van Stijn 2006). We then ran a Bayesian multivariate regression model based on only 13 of these variables, to assess the interaction between these and social variables. These models indicated that certain Nimwèègs features were used more frequently if speakers were members of the Nimwèègs Movement, potential interactions between gender and language use were also found.

The Indigenous languages of South America employ varying strategies for nominal purpose-marking; for instance, the markers used in this construction include benefactive case (in Macushi, see Abbot 1991) and possessives (in Lokono, see Pet 2011), but also specifically purposive adpositions (Kokama-Kokamilla, see Vallejos 2010). In this paper, I analyze and compare nominal purpose marking in two languages which are in close contact: Wapishana (Arawakan) and Taruma (unclassified). In Wapishana, the morpheme used in this construction is a TAM marker for non-present tense or irrealis mood which also functions as a nominalizer (dos Santos 2006; WLP 2000). I argue that the nominal purposive construction is essentially the subordination of a nominal predicate. The Taruma data stemming from recent fieldwork shows that the marker in question functions as a purposive marker and might also be a subordinator.

In this paper a syntactic analysis of the Dutch diminutive form eentje ‘one.dim’ is put forth. Within a syntactic approach to morphology, it is claimed that the form eentje results from movement operations to license an empty noun. On the basis of data from the Corpus Spoken Dutch (Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch data) on the combination of eentje and één ‘one’ with or without the quantitative pronoun er, it is argued that eentje does not result from nominalization, as could be suggested by the diminutive form in -tje. It is proposed that differences between Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch with respect to the omission of the quantitative pronoun er with één and eentje and higher numerals in the informal data point to a different analysis of een(tje) in these two varieties.

Since the 1980s, computational methods have been introduced to dialectology (known as dialectometry, cf. Goebl 1984, Heeringa 2004). Many of these methods were designed for data from dialect surveys or linguistic atlases, typically elicited items uttered in isolation. Scholars have turned to corpus-based approaches to seek dialect patterns from more naturalistic speech, which can tell us more about the context and magnitude of the variants used (Kuparinen and Scherrer 2024).

Transcriptions of spontaneous speech pose challenges for traditional approaches to automatic dialect classification: it is impossible to go through all the transcriptions manually; these are not systematic word lists; and we should not only extract the frequency of some known features, as we might overlook features that are not yet discovered.

This paper employs topic modelling to automatically detect dialect groups in the southern Dutch dialects. This method is data-driven and can overcome the issues mentioned above. The result shows that southern Dutch dialects can be divided into 2 to 4 major groups, coinciding with the traditional classification (Taeldeman 2001).

Language development research of the past 20 years has revealed that many aspects of semantics and pragmatics are acquired late, not until the school years. In the classroom, word problems in mathematics make extensive use of language. Here, we explore whether math language includes late acquired semantic constructions. As a first step, we focus on two Dutch quantifiers alle ‘all’ and elke ‘each’. Using the semantic notion of distributivity and applying insights from acquisition studies, we explore word problems in second-grade math books in Dutch. We find problems that target quantifier interpretations that may not be fully acquired by the age of 7–8, or are ambiguous even for adult speakers. We then formulate open questions that are triggered by this exploration, offering preliminary results. This study makes a case for interdisciplinary collaboration across semantics, language development and education to investigate whether math problems match school children’s acquisition path.

Predicting upcoming words in a sentence is important in sentence processing. Previous research has shown that children’s vocabulary size and language production skills influence prediction speed. This study investigates whether syntactic complexity affects predictive processing using eye-tracking in a picture-selection task. Three conditions were tested: baseline (object recognition), active (syntactically simple) and passive sentences (syntactically complex). Data was collected for 29 four- and five-year-old Dutch children and 10 Dutch young adults. Results show that adults predict sentence endings quickly and accurately, regardless of complexity. Children predicted in both conditions, but less strongly in passive sentences. These findings suggest that while both adults and children engage in predictive processing, syntactic complexity weakens prediction in children.

Languages differ in terms of the strategies used to derive (non-binary) inclusive language. In many languages, pronouns present the primary target (e.g., English, Swedish). In other languages, for instance German, inclusive language also affects other parts of grammar, such as nouns. To date, research on German gender-inclusive language has primarily focussed on mental representations, speakers’ attitudes, or use in newspapers. This contribution investigates the use of inclusive language in the recent novel Blutbuch (2022). A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the novel reveals the use of different examples of inclusive language, involving, for instance, the gender star (Student*innen ‘students’), in addition to traditional forms. Inclusive language forms not only refer to specific non-binary individuals, but also to groups of unknown gender. As such, they seem to be an addition to the German gender system, rather than a replacement of existing forms.