Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 30, Nummer 3, 2025

The paradigm of forms of address in Dutch was heavily in flux in the 17^th century (Vermaas 2002). Until now, these changes have mainly been studied empirically in letter corpora (e.g., Rutten & Van der Wal 2014; Bax 2010; Nobels 2013). The present study adds a new genre to this body of literature by analysing forms of address in 17^th-century Dutch newspapers, using the recently published Couranten Corpus (2022). In doing so, we intend to answer the question: how can the use of forms of address in 17^th-century Dutch newspapers be characterised, and how do their (sociolinguistic) usage patterns relate to those found in letters?

Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative descriptive approach as well as a random forest (RF) and an example conditional inference tree (CIT), we analyse the approximately 6,000 forms of address in the Couranten Corpus. In terms of how forms of address are used in the newspaper genre, we find that forms of address occur in different contexts within these newspapers: they are found in national and international news items, both in letters quoted in full as well as in direct quotations of either spontaneous or planned speech, and in specific newspaper-related contexts. Moreover, forms of address occur relatively frequently in articles from places in the present-day United Kingdom and Switzerland. Lastly, the social status of the people being addressed is in majority high, no matter what form of address found. Compared with the results from studies on 17^th-century letters, the usage patterns of the different forms of address in newspapers are largely the same: gij ‘you’ occurs often while u ‘you’ is still rare in subject position, and archaic du ‘thou’ and new jij ‘you’ barely occur, and mostly pejoratively. The epistolary forms U.E. ‘Your Honour/Worship’ and U.L. ‘Your Kindness/Love’ or ‘you people’, however, do not appear to follow the pattern predicted by the letter corpora. In newspapers, the form U.E., traditionally considered the later, incoming variant of the two, is more popular up until the 1670s, whereas U.L., considered the outgoing variant, instead gains popularity in the last two decades of the century. We argue that our results do not signify a reversal in diachrony, because U.E. and U.L. appear to be preferred in specific, non-related contexts. Interestingly, we also find the plural doublings U.U.L.L.A.A. and U.U.E.E., a phenomenon which has not been described for Dutch before. This study thus sheds light on the historical development of forms of address in the Dutch language in a previously unexplored genre, and additionally provides new insights into early modern newspaper language.

Language is full of expressions that we use instinctively to convey subtle communicative nuances, but whose precise contribution to the meaning of utterances is difficult to pinpoint. This squib argues that Construction Grammar offers a useful framework for capturing these nuances. By identifying the form and meaning of the broader construction in which such expressions appear, we can formulate plausible analyses of how they contribute to meaning beyond the descriptive level, for instance on the level of intersubjectivity. As a case study, I examine the Dutch evaluative wel-zo-construction (‘It is wel zo [ADJ] to do X’), in which the function of the double-negotiation particle wel and the demonstrative adverb zo is unclear. In this corpus-based exploratory study, I argue that this construction is used to positively evaluate some action or behavior in terms of social or practical desirability. As such, the construction is typically used to perform an indirect speech act: encouraging the hearer to behave accordingly, or legitimizing the speaker’s own behavior. Within this constructional framework, I offer new analyses of the functions of wel and zo, by determining how these elements contribute to shaping the performed indirect speech act on the level of intersubjectivity.