Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2014

Abstract Modern colloquial standard Dutch has a number of features involving non-standard inflection (verbal, adnominal, pronominal; involving gender, person, number and case), which appear to participate in ongoing processes of deflection. We focus on ten constructions, nine of which concern non-standard inflection. After discussing each phenomenon from the perspective of its place in the grammatical system, we int Read More

Abstract In this paper, the results of a salience experiment in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview in which they were asked to evaluate seven audio recordings, spoken in several regional versions of tussentaal (literally ‘in-between-language’) or in Standard Dutch. The informants had to judge which language variety was spoken in the recordings and they had to motivate on which fe Read More

Abstract This paper presents the results of a corpus study of Dutch complement PPs. On the basis of a collection of 3400 occurrences in negative sentences, the four major word order patterns (regular position, scrambling order, topicalization and extraposition) are studied, both in main and subordinate clauses, and linked to the properties of the prepositional phrases, in particular weight and definiteness. Greater weight corr Read More

Abstract It is often assumed that directional (or path) prepositional phrases (PPs) can serve as predicates. I will show that this assumption is not unproblematic, by making a comparison with locative (or place) PPs, especially where we expect both to show their predicative nature most directly, namely as attributive modifiers of nouns. If directional PPs cannot always function as predicates, as I will show, then this compli Read More