oa Bennis (1986) anno 2016: de tuin uit, het bos in?

In this essay, I challenge Hans Bennis to rewrite his influential PhD-thesis Gaps and Dummies (1986) in function of evolved linguistic thinking about data collection issues, and the I-language vs. E-language dichotomy. More concretely, I dare him to renounce the generative garden of introspected generalizations, and face the jungle of spontaneously produced data, in order to fully appreciate the distributional complexity of existential constructions, and – more fundamentally – the functional motor of the grammar, or rather grammars of Dutch.