Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2024

Northern Standard Dutch, i.e. the standard variety spoken in the Netherlands, is currently subject to an ongoing vowel shift that started approximately 100 years ago. This so-called ‘Polder shift’ changes tense mid vowels to upgliding diphthongs and lowers the nuclei of diphthongs. Sociolinguistic migrants – speakers of Southern Standard Dutch who moved from Flanders to The Netherlands – may adopt these sound changes, but do so with substantial individual differences in both qualitative and quantitative respects. In addition, there are individual differences between non-migrant speakers of the two varieties. I analyze the Polder shift as an ongoing process of phonologization, relating these individual differences to two separate but interrelated properties: phonology, viz. allophonic conditioning, and phonetic implementation, viz. the degree of diphthongization and lowering. I conclude that these individual differences represent different stages of this ongoing phonologization.

Syntactic theories are typically construed based on acceptability judgments. These judgments are increasingly often collected experimentally, testing larger sets of linguistically naive participants. An important assumption is that participants have a very clear understanding of what it is they are asked to do, which can be assessed by establishing their internal consistency. The question we address in this paper is whether ‘human measuring instruments’ are consistent in their judgments. To this end, we re-examined the judgment data from Schoenmakers (2023), where three types of violations of the prescriptive norm and object scrambling sentences were evaluated. We used Generalizability Theory to investigate the degree of covariation in the judgments and found that the internal consistency was poor in the norm violation item sets, but excellent in the scrambling item set. A difference between the data patterns is that the former item sets led to ‘sledgehammer’ effects between the stigmatized and non-stigmatized variants, which left little room for participant variation. Our analyses show that judgments from naive native speakers can adequately serve linguistic theorizing, both in the case of stigmatized and non-stigmatized variation. Furthermore, we performed cluster analyses to identify subgroups of participants to get a better grasp on the variation in the data set. We conclude that specific statistical analyses can help understand data and advance linguistic theory building.

This research aims to provide a diachronic analysis of the developments in the Dutch pronouns degene/diegene ‘the one/those who’, from 1200 to the present, as cataphor and anaphor. To achieve our aim, three research questions will be answered: (i) how have form and meaning in the use of degene/diegene developed over the years? (ii) which developments can be specifically identified in the last two decades? and (iii) what differences are there in contemporary Dutch between anaphoric diegene, the ordinary free anaphors hij/zij ‘he/she’ and the demonstrative die ‘that’? Firstly, the different stages of Dutch from 1200 to the present are discussed on the basis of language data collected with a large number of digital corpora and other digital text material, and additional observations of oral and written language use. Then the data described will be analyzed in a diachronic context, in which the first two research questions will be answered. It will appear that in the course of time degene and diegene are differentiated, each in their own way, as cataphor and anaphor, and that all developments indicate a widening use and an optimal division of labour between these pronouns. Finally, six differences are discussed between diegene, the anaphors hij/zij and the demonstrative die. This study presents the first diachronic overview of the changes in the use of degene/diegene in the period from 1200 to the present.