oa Schijnen in gesproken Belgisch en Nederlands Nederlands

In the recent past a number of contributions have been published on the subject of Dutch seem and appear verbs. Special attention has been paid to the third person simple present of schijnt (‘seems’) in spoken Belgian and to some extent also in spoken Netherlandic Dutch (Van Bogaert & Colleman 2013). The authors propose a two way strategy – parataxis hypothesis and matrix hypothesis – in order to account for the realisations and positions of schijnt as in ’t schijnt sterven daar veel talen af (‘it seems many languages are expire there’) and … ze hebben – zo schijnt het – geen middelen … (they don’t have – as it seems – any means). However, it is argued here that the evidence for the matrix hypothesis is weak. As an alternative a derivation from the in spoken Belgian Dutch comparatively frequent construction naar het schijnt will be proposed.