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This paper aims to offer a typology of Dutch insubordinate infinitives, which, following Evans's (2007) definition of insubordination, are defined as 'the main clause use' of infinitival constructions. The main objectives of this paper are to provide a pragmatic analysis of these constructions in Dutch and, through cross-linguistic comparison, investigate whether their attested pragmatic functions correspond to the pragmatic functions of (a) insubordinate constructions in general and (b) insubordinate infinitives in particular. This is done on the basis of a corpus study, examining a sample of independent infinitival constructions attested in the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN). Ultimately, three primary functions are distinguished for Dutch insubordinate infinitives that align with different types of insubordinate constructions attested cross-linguistically: they can be employed for (i) discursive strategies, (ii) interpersonal control, and (iii) evaluation and exclamation. In addition, through processes of insubordination and idiomatization a new type of output is created in which the insubordinate infinitival constructions behave as discourse markers. In adopting a language-specific, corpus-based approach, this study provides a first systematic and comprehensive functional typology of insubordinate infinitival constructions in Dutch. At the same time, it contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate on the functional load of insubordinate constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the variable placement of the particle of particle verb constructions in Dutch and German. In particular, the option to place the particle in first sentence position is studied in a judgment task. We asked native speakers of Dutch to judge utterances which differ with respect to the semantic transparency of the particle and with respect to the distance between particle and verb. In spite of an overall awkwardness of constructions with a fronted particle, the factors under investigation turned out to influence their well-formedness. Our observations thus raise some questions about the acceptability and the grammaticality status of such dubious structures. When comparing our results to those found by Trotzke et al. (2015), who did a similar study for German, we find that the patterns in the two languages are similar but that there are nonetheless some important differences to note. We suggest that this discrepancy has to do with the more flexible use of the first sentence position in German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages use verbs of perception to express evidentiality. This paper studies the evidential use of the object-oriented perception verb eruitzien 'look' in Dutch. The results of a Twitter corpus study show that, whereas ziet eruit alsof 'looks as if' occasionally comes with an evidential interpretation, the construction ziet ernaar uit 'looks like' predominantly expresses inferential evidentiality. A diachronic investigation shows how the evidential reading of this construction developed from the object-oriented use of the verb, through a stage in which the construction is used to mark a prediction. This predictive reading, which is still available in present-day Dutch, is not evidential. It does not indicate a speaker has supporting evidence for a factual claim, but rather they have evidence for something they expect to become a fact in the near future. Our diachronic study also reveals how another construction, with a subject-oriented verb (eruit) zien 'see (from it)', once used to be an expression of inferential evidentiality as well. This particular construction appears to have lost the competition to its object-oriented counterpart ziet ernaar uit 'looks like', as it is no longer attested. We argue that the construction ziet ernaar uit 'looks like' has fully developed into an evidential construction, since its current primary function is to express evidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the online spread of non-standard Dutch in an unexplored communicative setting, i.e. complaint management on corporate Facebook pages. Based on a self-compiled corpus of consumer-company interactions taken from 6 corporate Facebook pages, we investigate to what extent typical features of informal social media communication spill over into more sensitive contexts of complaint management. We do so by mapping the presence and frequency of 27 Flemish old vernacular and 13 new vernacular features (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011) in consumer-initiated posts, company replies and consumer-to-consumer interactions. The results show that some, though not all, new vernacular features occur relatively frequently in both consumer and company messages. Consumers predominantly use new vernacular features for expressive compensation, while companies appear to incorporate them in their webcare (especially emoji and English insertions) as functional operationalisations of conversational human voice (Kelleher 2009) and to support their desired brand identity. In contrast, old vernacular features rarely occur in the dataset. This suggests a different status of old and new vernacular features, where the former are deemed less appropriate or more limited in terms of functionality in this communicative setting. Despite the often informal register of the consumer messages, Standard Dutch still seems the preferred or safer option for company-addressed posts while companies, too, cling to Standard Dutch as the benchmark for professional written communication in this online context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expect the unexpected. About the different ways in which the Dutch and the Flemish use er In this paper I report experimental data I have ignored for almost ten years because I did not know what to do with them. I still don't know exactly, but the 25th anniversary of this journal is a key occasion to share them, if only because they fittingly illustrate that the syntax of Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch are diverging. The new data demonstrate that contrary to categorical Netherlandic intuitions that er is ungrammatical in sentences with a fronted locative (such as Op de envelop zat een postzegel), er is not only grammatical, but also beneficial to the Dutch language user. Compared to Belgian Dutch, however, the principal beneficiary of er's processing advantage no longer is the subject noun phrase, but anything that follows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an explorative sociophonetic study of the phoneme /s/ in the Dutch language area. Our aim is to investigate the regional variation in the realisation of this phoneme, and to test experimentally the observation of Collins & Mees (2003) that /s/ is sometimes pronounced more like [J], especially in the Randstad area (called s-retraction). One hundred native speakers of Dutch produced nineteen monosyllabic words containing /s/ in different syllabic contexts. The speakers were born and raised in one of five regions of the Dutch language area (West Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Netherlands Limburg, South Holland and Groningen). Spectral centre of gravity (CoG) and duration were used to measure the degree of s-retraction. CoG values turned out to be significantly lower (consistent with more retraction) in the regions in The Netherlands than in the Flemish regions. Speakers from South Holland produced significantly shorter /s/ than the other speakers. In conclusion, /s/ shows patterns of regional variation that are not fully in line with the observation forwarded by Collins & Mees (2003). The difference between the Flemish and Dutch regions shows that s-retraction is found in an area larger than the Randstad, possibly pointing towards a North-South pattern of variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a quantitative variationist analysis of the future markers gaan and zullen in modern spoken Dutch in the light of current discussion on grammaticalisation. In order to determine to what extent gaan has been grammaticalised, internal constraints on the distribution of gaan and zullen such as verb type, animacy of subject, grammatical person, clause type, sentence type and proximity of future reference are investigated, using Netherlandic and Belgian data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. The purpose of investigating constraints such as animacy of subject and proximity of future reference is to establish to what extent the behaviour of gaan is still determined by its lexical history (i.e. as a verb denoting motion towards an immediate goal), and results demonstrate that these two constraints persist in modern Dutch. Moreover, research on grammaticalisation in other languages has shown that grammaticalised markers can become specialised to certain morphosyntactic environments such as particular grammatical persons or types of clause. Indeed, it will be shown here that the use of gaan is favoured in subordinate clauses and non-first person utterances, which it has in common with English be going to. By contrast, zullen is shown to occur in pragmatically more nuanced contexts, indicated by the presence of modal particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one subtype of semi-insubordination in Dutch, viz. adverbial and adjectival semi-insubordinate dat-constructions (e.g. Misschien/ Leuk dat hij komt 'Maybe/nice that he comes'). These constructions display an unusual syntactic status in that they consist of a (formally) subordinate dat-clause which is preceded by just one adverb or adjective, instead of a full matrix clause. In this study, I will outline the semantic, structural and functional properties of semi-insubordinate dat-constructions by reviewing previous accounts of this phenomenon against empirical corpus data. The data show that there are basically two types of initial elements in semi-insubordinate dat-constructions: evaluative and discursive ones. Both subtypes challenge traditional syntactic analyses in that they extend beyond the sentence level: they represent syntactically independent units, but pragmatically they are highly dependent on prior discourse. It will therefore be argued that it is essential to include aspects of discourse organization in the analysis of semi-insubordinate dat-constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion paper, a comparative overview of the behaviour of adjectives in Afrikaans and Dutch is given by utilising two descriptive categories identified by Broekhuis (2013), viz complementation and modification. While noticeable areas of overlap and similarity between the two languages can be shown, some important systematic differences exist, both with regard to complementation and modification, and these are illustrated by means of (as far as possible, empirical) examples. The explanatory value of a performance grammar, in the light of the variable behaviour of adjectives in certain fields, is emphasised, while recognising the extensive range of linguistic categories made possible by introspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is part of an ongoing discussion between Hans Broekhuis and myself about the second opposition in the binary tense system originally proposed by Te Winkel (1866). This opposition connects the first one (between Past and Present) and the third one (between Imperfect(ive) and Perfect(ive)). Broekhuis is radical in proposing to do without it. This proposal is too radical in my view, so I want to temper his cutting edge mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that ascending verb cluster orders (1-2 and 1-2-3, e.g. moet eten 'must eat' and moet hebben gegeten 'must have eaten') are not only the default verb cluster orders in Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, but also play a crucial role in the acquisition of verb clusters. We administered a series of three sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) to a total of 120 children (2;8-5;6), and found that children, in contrast to what previous literature might predict, are much more likely to produce 1-2 orders than 2-1 orders. We propose an acquisition pathway in which we assume an OV stage (VFIN-final) and a 1-2 stage before children completely fine-tune their preferences toward adult-like behavior. We further argue that this pathway first applies to bipartite modal-infinitive clusters but is quickly expanded to include all cluster types. We believe our proposal has three advantages: it answers an important learnability question, explains the differences attested between the way children of different ages handle verb clusters, and strongly suggests that verb clusters follow one general rule, rather than several separate construction-specific ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]