Nederlandse Taalkunde - Current Issue

This paper concerns the negative quantifier geen (‘no’) in Afrikaans. Superficially, along with the rest of the negative indefinite paradigm, a component of the continuity between Afrikaans and Dutch, we show that Afrikaans geen is, in fact, very different to its Dutch cognate. This difference is evident both in first-language acquisition patterns, and in distributional terms. We present a multi-part corpus study probing the occurrence in child speech, child-directed adult speech and adult-directed adult speech of geen and two elements that are in competition with geen in Afrikaans: its “analytic”, standard negation-harnessing counterpart, nie 'n (‘not a’), and the negative indefinite niks (‘nothing’). In the acquisition domain, we learn that geen is acquired very late, whereas both nie 'n and niks are in place early, fulfilling a range of functions that are reserved for geen in Dutch. In contrast, we learn that geen is acquired early in Dutch. Distributionally, Dutch geen constitutes the discourse-neutral form, both in count and in mass contexts, with niet een (‘not a’) being reserved for discourse-marked uses. For Afrikaans, however, a large-scale markedness reversal appears to have occurred, with nie 'n – i.e. a standard negation-containing structure – representing the unmarked form. The language’s innovative and, apparently, acquisitionally salient negative imperatives seem key in understanding this development, a matter that we leave to future research. Our conclusion here is that the behaviour of Afrikaans geen points to a negation system that has departed even further from the original Dutch template than has been appreciated to date.

The Dutch word sowieso is a loanword from German. However, it differs from the German source word in its distribution and scope of meaning. In this paper, we provide evidence for differences in usage and acceptability from a corpus study and a rating study. We argue that the source word and loanword differ in their basic meaning and use conditions, constituting a case of semantic-pragmatic microvariation. In German, sowieso picks up a contextually given or inferable proposition, denies its causal relevance for the case at hand and indicates the causal decisiveness of an alternative proposition. In contrast, sowieso in Dutch does not target or presuppose a proposition from the discourse context. We propose that its core meaning can be described in terms of strengthening.

This article examines the morphological status and use of the competing suffixes -isatie and -isering in Dutch. Previous hypotheses about possible semantic differences or differences in usage in Belgian and Dutch contexts are reviewed, and the competition between the two suffixes is studied from a comparative linguistic perspective.

Special attention will be paid to the productive use of -isering. A central claim is that to make judgments about productivity and competition we need to look at semantically and/or pragmatically determined niches within a morphological category. Therefore, we will be concerned with the pragmatic function and social meaning of morphological patterns.

This study investigates the processing of middle constructions (middles) in Dutch, German and English. Middles combine a non-agentive subject with an action verb in the active form, fitting into the loose vs. tight fit typology established by Hawkins (1986) to capture the main contrasts between German and English. In English, they lead to greater ambiguity and vagueness in forms (loose fit), as in middles, while in German they result in more one-to-one mappings of form and meaning (tight fit). Middles, as instances of flexible argument structure, contribute to a loose fit as they add to the semantic diversity of grammatical relations (cf. Hawkins 1986; Müller-Gotama 1994; Levshina 2020).

a. This bookreads easily.

b. Dit boekleest gemakkelijk.

c. Dieses Buchliest *(sich) leicht.

Building on a fruitful research line that positions Dutch linguistically between English and German (Van Haeringen 1956), our study investigated native speakers of Dutch, German and English by means of a self-paced reading task, in order to demonstrate processing differences in non-agentive subject-verb combinations in various types of middles, and determine the position of Dutch in the loose vs. tight fit-typology.

Our results reveal that German speakers experience greater difficulty processing middles, as evidenced by slower reading times compared to English speakers. Reading times for Dutch speakers fall between those of English and German speakers but exhibit greater similarity to English, suggesting that Dutch aligns more closely with the loose fit languages.

The experiment indicates that both documented and undocumented (extended) middles are read faster in Dutch and English than in German. These findings suggest fundamental differences in processing strategies for semantically diverse subject-verb combinations. Our results enable us to discuss hypotheses based on psycholinguistically informed comparisons of German and English (most notably by Hawkins 1995; 2012; 2014) and address the question of diachronic-causal relations in language change from a language processing perspective, in line with the view that grammars are deeply shaped by processing (Christiansen & Chater 2008; Sinnemäki 2014).

English, Dutch, and German make use of an expressive wh-construction that has a commentary function, evaluates an event negatively, and is rooted in intensifying constructions such as wh- in the world. An English example is What in the Devil Wears Prada is going on?, which expresses incomprehension (like intensified open wh-questions) and conveys negative emotions, but also contains a comment by simultaneously answering the question: the above example can be paraphrased as “What is going on here? This reminds me of the contents of the film The Devil Wears Prada,” whereby the event commented on is negatively evaluated by linking it with another object. This contribution investigates how intensified wh-questions such as wh- in the world are related to such examples of intensified comments (i.e., intensified wh-questions with a commentary function), and how the latter are rooted in the former. It furthermore compares the use of intensified comments in English, Dutch and German. It is demonstrated that intensified comments build on the conventionalised pragmatic functions of intensified wh-questions in all three languages, although the concrete wh-templates differ (wh- in the/de X for English and Dutch, wh- zum X for German). The intensified wh-template that is being used depends on its status in the language: it is in every case the most versatile template that allows for most variation. Data from the social media platform X shows that intensified comments are frequent in English and infrequent in German, yielding a situation in which Dutch (which borrows its intensified-comment template from English) takes the middle road. Moreover, English and Dutch intensified comments are more versatile with regard to their syntactic buildup: non-NP constructions such as Whatin the [academics doing things]VPis this? and gender-mismatched constructions such as Wat in de.utr[Mandela-effect.neut]NPis dit? are unproblematic, while German intensified comments only occur with nouns and year numbers (e.g., Was zum [Grafikfehler]NPist das?, Was zum 2020 is das?).

For the development of complex predicates in Dutch, Blom (2004: 45) hypothesized that non-resultative elements can grammaticalize into separable particles, progressing into inseparable prefixes, while resultative elements can only evolve into separable particles, but no further. This paper evaluates Blom’s hypothesis, focusing on six verbs: ondergaan ‘go down; undergo’, onderdrukken ‘suppress’, onderwerpen ‘subject’, overtuigen ‘convince’, overreden ‘persuade’, and overhandigen ‘hand over’, the last five of which at first glance seem to contradict this hypothesis. Using the EDGeS-corpus (Bouma et al. 2020) and a subset of the DBNL (following Van Olmen 2019), which span Middle Dutch to contemporary Dutch data, we examine the verbs’ form and semantics. By proposing alternative explanations for three of the five exceptions, we argue that Blom’s hypothesis can largely be upheld. However, the verbs onderdrukken ‘suppress’ and onderwerpen ‘subject’ remain problematic, requiring further analyses to fully assess the validity of the hypothesis.