Search

In this introductory paper we discuss the expanding focus of lexical borrowing research over the past decade. Where this 'inevitable' outcome of language contact was originally predominantly addressed from a historical linguistic and lexicographic perspective, a broader range of linguistic traditions have recently been applied to the topic, each introducing their own questions, perspectives and methods. Below, we first present the main insights ensuing from a century of loanword research. Then, we introduce the viewpoints that characterize more recent work and the questions they foreground. In presenting the contributions to this special issue, we finally pay specific attention to the way the six papers add to the broader tendencies and innovations of current lexical borrowing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Taal & Tongval is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper introduces the field of historical sociolinguistics and gives a brief impression of the advances made during the last three decades. Furthermore, the relationship between local and international perspectives is stressed, while discussing the papers in the present Taal & Tongval issue. Finally, new research perspectives and the importance of using original archive sources come to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper outlines the different trends and movements that have in recent years led to a marked increase in the number of linguistic studies that combine a construction-based theoretical outlook on grammar with a dedicated interest in issues of synchronic and/or diachronic language variation. In addition, it gives an overview of the papers included in this thematic issue and links them with broader tendencies in the fields of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of 'languageculture,' an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as praxis are studied in relation to another (cf. Cornips et al 2012). It focuses on the construction of local and regional identities in Limburg and the linguistic political context of this Southern-Netherlands region where people are strongly aware of their linguistic distinctiveness. This contribution addresses the impact of globalization processes and mobility of speakers resulting in new and complex patterns of cultural and linguistic encounters. Since globalization does not only affect dominant areas, we need a new understanding of language and identities in peripheral areas in Europe (cf. Cornips et al. 2012). Although dialects are traditionally seen and analyzed as something that anchor people in a local context, speakers have become translocal i.e. people and the ways in which they speak are on the move (cf. Quist 2010). In this paper, in contrast to dialectology and dialect atlases based on modern linguistic theoretical insights like the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), place is not conceived in objective, physical terms but instead as an emic, culturally defined category (Johnstone 2004). The process of place-making provides insight in how people categorize themselves and others through languagecultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the seventeenth century, the use of diminutive suffixes in Dutch was changing: the [kə] suffix was making way for the present-day Standard suffix [jə] - a transition which involved many hybrid suffixes - and the present-day substandard [i] also made its entrance. In this paper, the use of the different types of diminutives in private letters of the seventeenth-century Letters as Loot corpus will be examined for regional and social variation. This corpus consists of 595 letters - 545 of which are private - written by men and women of different social backgrounds. Its contents enable historical (socio)linguists to extensively examine seventeenth-century Dutch from the perspective of the language history 'from below' for the first time. However, examining the seventeenth-century diminutive suffixes is a difficult enterprise, for the various spelling forms in the letters frequently obscure the difference between the phonological types of suffixes [i] and [jə]. In order to shed new light on the history of Dutch diminutive suffixes, this paper also presents a method of analysis to categorise particular spelling forms as particular phonological types of suffixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses variation and change in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Dutch, reviewing the importance of two types of explanation, the first focusing on dialect contact resulting from immigration as the locus of change, the second stressing the importance of writing conventions. Using a unique corpus of private letters from all social ranks, we discuss various phonological and morphosyntactic variables. We argue that ego-documents offer unique opportunities for historical (socio)linguistics, providing an unprecedented view of the vernacular. At the same time, writers did not consistently put their local dialect to paper. Writing practices such as morphological and syllabic orthographic principles caused the written code to move away from the vernacular. Supralocalization and graphemization, which are topics at the core of historical sociolinguistics, have to be taken into account by anyone interested in the communicative strategies which ordinary people used when they needed to write. At the same time, since supralocalization and graphemization may impede research on spoken language phenomena, they should also be addressed by researchers primarily interested in spoken language phenomena such as dialect contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with the traditional (standard-oriented) account of codification in French commonly presented in histoires de la langue. In them the seventeenth-century grammarians are portrayed (a) as being engaged, in a detached and rational way, in a programme of intellectual and aesthetic perfection of the language, and (b) as being the country's linguistic legislators, working (teleologically) to design and set up a standard variety of French for the benefit of future generations. Our paper tries to show, first of all, that when we set the process of codification in French within its broad sociolinguistic context, we see the extent to which it was contingent on wider social concerns: codification did not happen in an atmosphere of serene detachment and rationality but was conditioned throughout by the social tensions endemic in a city the size of Paris. The paper then looks at the particular role of grammarians, notably Vaugelas, and notes that he himself makes no claim to be initiating or directing the process of linguistic change, but merely to be reflecting usage. While the grammarians give preference to salient variants possessing the highest social value (bon usage), it cannot be said that they actually set those values. These emerge from a consensus involving directly or indirectly the whole community. The development in the speech of a big city the size of Paris is traditionally seen in terms of top-down standardisation, but it is preferable to see it in terms of dialect-mixing and koineisation. What we see reflected in many of Vaugelas' Remarques is one of the processes involved in koineisation isolated by Peter Trudgill and labelled as 'reallocation of variants': the community tacitly accommodates linguistic variants left over from earlier instances of dialect-contact within its overall scheme of socio-stylistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a research conducted in West-Flanders on the attitudes towards tussentaal, a Flemish substandard language variety. This research aims to answer three questions pertaining to these attitudes. The fi rst question is what the impact of the variable 'age' is on the attitudes towards tussentaal. Although previous research has been conducted on attitudes towards this language variety, so far no attention has been paid to age-specifi c patterns in these attitudes. The second question is which tussentaal elements can account for certain positive or negative attitudes towards the variety as a whole. In order to answer this question, this research will focus on defi nite and indefi nite article forms that are typical for tussentaal with the aim of discovering how people perceive the tussentaal forms with respect to the standard forms. This fifi eld of research is relatively unexplored, which entails some methodological issues. As such, this part of the research can be considered a methodological experiment. The third and fi nal question is what impact the frequency of the tussentaal article forms has on the attitude of the informants. These three questions are discussed more elaborately in the fi rst part of this paper. The design of the research (the variables and the methodology) is explained in the second part. The fi nal part of this paper presents the results of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southern Dutch variety has a traditional, so-called 'grammatical' gender system, in which pronouns agree in gender with their antecedent noun, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter. For most nouns, there is no apparent semantic motivation underlying gender assignment. However, this kind of grammatical system may be replaced with a system that makes use of semantically-motivated gender-marked pronouns, by a process termed 'resemantisation'. Certain elements of semantic gender systems are to be found in the language acquisition of southern children. This paper addresses the question to what extent these semantic tendencies in pronoun usage by children are indicative of an ongoing change in the southern pronominal gender system. Hence it focuses on pronominal gender usage of adults and adolescents as well as language acquiring children. The results reveal first, that even adolescents do not yet reach an adult-like proficiency in the grammatical gender system, and, second, that the influence of grammatical gender on pronominal reference gradually decreases from generation to generation. Though grammatical gender still stands strong, clear semantic patterns are observed, which indicate an ongoing process of resemantisation. The data for adolescents also suggest that the resemantisation process is pushed forward by language acquirers. In this paper the dynamics of this process will be discussed as well as how this fits in the typology of resemantisation pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I study the microvariation that is found in (long-distance) relative clauses, as it is attested in the SAND corpus (Barbiers et al. 2005, 2006). Dutch dialects show a wealth of variation regarding long-distance relative clauses. More specifically, they show variation along the following four dimensions: (i) the form of the element that introduces the relative clause (die/dat), (ii) the form of the element that introduces the most deeply embedded clause (die/dat), (iii) the presence/absence of a complementizer in addition to the relative pronoun (i.e. doubly filled COMP), and (iv) the presence/absence of an overt subject/object (resumptive pronoun) at the extraction site. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I will give a detailed overview of the data with the general goal to create some order in the chaos and to get more insights into the limits of variation. Second, I will focus on a particular set of data, namely a group of dialects that makes use of different structures for subject-relativization and object-relativization (subject/object asymmetries) and I will provide an analysis that adequately accounts for these patterns. The proposal is primarily based on the observation that there is a correlation between subject/object asymmetries (in relative clauses) and complementizer agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of regional variation patterns in the pronunciation of standard Dutch /γ/ as spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders. The subjects are 80 Dutch and 80 Flemish professional speakers of the standard language (Dutch language teachers), stratified for region, gender and age. The speech material used in this paper consists of read carrier sentences, with the fricative in onset position, and in which the participants were maximally focused on standard pronunciation. The analyses are based on auditory transcriptions of voice, place of articulation and scrapiness. Seventeen variants of /γ/ show up in the data, but there is a clear geographical split, not coinciding with the state border between the Netherlands and Flanders: north of the rivers Waal and Maas uvular realizations appear to be the standard, south of them (palato-)velars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the syntactic variation displayed by the infinitival complement in so-called accusative-and-infinitive constructions with the matrix verb zien in its sense of 'expect, foresee' (e.g. Ik zie hem morgen (te) komen - 'I expect him to arrive tomorrow'). While this construction exclusively features a bare infinitive in present-day Standard Dutch, the alternative pattern with te + infinitive has been attested in a number of Flemish dialects. On the basis of the results from a questionnaire study, we will pinpoint this construction with te + infinitive as a primordially East Flemish phenomenon. In the second part of the paper, it will be argued that the use of the te particle in this pattern is motivated by its "isolating" function. This will involve a concise discussion of the syntactic and semantic evolution of the accusative-and-infinitive construction from Middle Dutch onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005 the third and final volume of the Fonologische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (abbreviated : FAND) was published.1t was based on an enormous database, which between 1975 and 1994 was realized in three steps: (1) the composition of a questionnaire (1878 isolated words + word groups + short sentences) and the selection of a network of 578 places for fieldwork, (2) the registration and the transcription of the data and (3) the construction and the operationalization of the electronically accessible database. In all the FAND comprises 496 maps (on the right-hand pages) and every map is commented upon on the opposite left-hand page. The comments contain some recurrent ingredients : an overall description of the mapped variation, references to other FAND-maps, to older material, to older monographs and to studies relating to the subject matter under consideration. In many cases there is also an interpretative component, which mainly contains suggestions about which factors may be held responsible for the registered (synchronic) variants and their spatial distribution. In this article I try to answer four fundamental questions with respect to the FAND: 1. 2. 116 What was the authors' main intent for setting up a paper atlas af ter an electronically accessible database had been realised? In section (1.2.) we discuss the relation between the database and the paper atlas and (try to) point out the advantages that arise from the atlas product. Is the FAND basically a synchronic or a diachronic atlas? In section (1.3.) we (try to) demonstrate that, although in the first two volumes on vowel variation we departed from a West-Germanic diasystem, this atlas fundamentally deals with synchronic variation. The historical diasystem was only called in as a reference system/an ordering system, in order to prevent us from comparing apples and oranges. 3. What were the main methodological steps in setting up the atlas? This aspect is dealt with in great detail in section (2.) 4. What can one do with the FAND? In section (3.) we (try to) demonstrate that the FAND adequately functions as a catalyst of questions with respect to the hows and the whys of (a) phonological changes and (b) the spatial distribution of the resulting variants, and also as a generator of questions to other linguistic disciplines and more particularly to phonetics. Together with the database the FAND is meant to facilitate answers to all kinds of questions with respect to phonological variation in the Dutch dialects : what are the ingredients of this phonologicallandscape and how do they interrelate systematically, spatially and historically? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the design, methodology and results of the project Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND) that was carried out between 2000 and 2004. The project involved data collection, description and analysis of the syntactic variation in 267 dialects of Dutch spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern-France. The results so far include: (i) the research tooI DynaSAND, a linguistically enriched on-line database with search engine and cartographic tooI to visualize the geographic distribution of syntactic variables; (ii) a two-volume printed atlas SAND; Volume 1 gives an overview of the syntactic variation in the left periphery of the clause, subject pronouns and subject agreement, reflexive systems and fronting; Volume 2 concerns variation in the verbal system and negation; (iii) four dissertations dealing with specific syntactic phenomena in the Dutch dialects, i.e. ellipsis (Van Craenenbroeck), first conjuct and complementizer agreement (Van Koppen), negation (Zeijlstra) and subject pronouns and agreement (De Vogelaer). The paper ends with a section on prospects for future research in syntactic microvariation. The bibliography contains all the publications that came out of the SAND project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on various aspects of the verbal hendiadys in Dutch dialects. The verbal hendiadys is a construction in which a finite verb of bodily posture combines with the coordinative element en 'and', followed by an infinitival verb. Data from the SAND project (Syntactische Atlas Nederlandse Dialecten) indicate that the construction is (still) available in at least four dialects spoken in the West Flemish and French Flemish areas. The first part of the paper is concerned with the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of the construction. In the second part of the paper the syntactic structure of the construction is discussed. Despite the presence of the coordinative element en 'and', it is argued on the basis of several syntactic and semantic tests that the verbal hendiadys is not an instance of coordination. Rather than coordination, the tests suggest that the verbal hendiadys is an instance of subordination. The presence of a coordinative element in a subordinate structure is not surprising from a cross-linguistic point of view. In for instance Afrikaans and the Scandinavian languages, a coordinative element occurs in so-called pseudo-coordinate structures. It has been demonstrated that these constructions also involve subordination rather than coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender and N-movement in West Flemish The variation in word order between English (la) and Italian (lb) has been interpreted in terms of DP-internal head-movement. (1) a. English a white cat b. Italian un gatto bianco *a cat white *un bianco gatto Based on work by Harris (1991), Bernstein (1993) argues that the trigger for leftward N-movement rests in the presence or absence of the terminal vowel on N, which marks gender or noun-class. Typically, Italian masculine nouns end in -o and feminine nouns end in -a. For languages with overt gender marking of this kind she postulates a DP-internal functional head WM (word marker). The availability of WM correlates with (i) indefinite N ellipsis and (ii) N-movement. She postulates that Romance languages have the head WM, while Germanic languages lack WM. WF data show that the correlation between the availability of a terminal vowel, i.e. the functional head WM, and lower N-movement cannot be maintained. The language lacks lower N-movement: (2) a. een zwarte katte b. *een katte zwart(e) a black cat a cat black In Bernstein's approach, absence of N-movement in WF, as displayed in (2a,b), would correlate with absence of the WM/terminal vowel. However, in WF there is a systematic correlation between the final schwa and feminine gender. Indeed, the WF evidence for a WM head is more robust than that provided by Bernstein in support of the WM in French. (3) illustrates a minimal pair, where terminal -e is pronounced [a]. (3) a. bom masc 'bottom' b. bomme- fem 'bomb' My conclusion is that presence of terminal vowels as such cannot be the trigger for N-movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard Dutch has two open vowels: a long front vowel [a] as in the word "maan" (linguistic variable in this paper) and a short back vowel [A], as in the word "man" (linguistic variable in this paper). The dialects of Utrecht and Amsterdam, however, have a different feature distribution, with pronounced at the back of the mouth, and at the front. In Amsterdam, place of articulation appears to be the only difference with Standard Dutch, but in Utrecht there seems to be an additional difference: the vowel in the word "man" is often heard as long. This paper investigates the validity of these impressions by measuring the durations and formant frequencies of ten minimal - pairs, pronounced by about ten speakers of both dialects and of Standard Dutch. The results show that the Utrecht and Amsterdam pronunciations of do have the same degree of backness as the Standard-Dutch pronunciation of , and that the Amsterdam and Utrecht versions of are, relatively speaking, front vowels. However, their positions are much less advanced than that of the Standard-Dutch realisation of , which stands out here as an extremely front, extremely open vowel. The durational measurements show that in Utrecht is significantly longer than in Amsterdam and in Standard Dutch, but still considerably shorter than . Finally, a perceptual test showed that experienced listeners are quite capable of assigning the various realisations of and , after they have been excised from the words in which they occur, to the right vowel category and the right dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a terminological study of the language of football reporting carried out by Serbruyns (1991). Based on a corpus of written and spoken material consisting of 548 types and 9585 tokens for 28 concepts occurring in the semantic field of 'football' in the Netherlands and Flanders, the paper comes to the following tentative conclusions: (1) Both in the Netherlands and Flanders the language of football reporting is mainly "Dutch." Our corpus consists of12,1% of Dutch lexemes versus 21% of English ones and 6,3% of French ones. For 22 of the 28 kernal football concepts analysed in this paper, the English borrowing was replaced by a Dutch semantic equivalent. Journalists prefer using Dutch words to refer to football concepts. However, to bring some variation in their language, they often switch to the English term. Influence of English is most noticeable in compound expressions: 33,3% of all compounds show influence of English, while in simplex forms this is the case for only 10,2%. (2) There is hardly any difference between the language of football reporting as written and spoken in Flanders and as used in the Netherlands concerning the extensiveness of the terminology and the number of references to central concepts, except for some minor differences reflecting the reality of football itself. Flemish reporters tend to make more use of stylistic devices, such as comparisons, metaphors and metonymies than their Dutch colleagues. (3) The difference between the spoken and the written media lies mainly in the extensiveness and variation typical of the language of newspapers and magazines. (4) The football terminology is well represented in Van Dale (1992) and in Grote Koenen (1986), where not only the "neutral" terms, but also the marked vocabulary (metaphors and metonymies) having a special football interpretation, are entered. In this respect, Van Dale (1992) is more extensive than Grote Koenen (1986). The dictionary of football language by Siekmann (1978), however, is incomplete and inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the reported attitudes of Flemish Sign Language (or VGT) signers with respect to Standard(ised) VGT and (varieties of) VGT in the media. Information extracted from interviews with and stimulus fragments shown to ten deaf VGT signers shows that they no longer consider standardization of VGT negatively. However, they do not value standard versus nonstandard varieties in terms of status versus solidarity traits (Giles & Coupland, 1991), but rather in terms of intelligibility versus identity. With respect to VGT on national television the quality of signing is considered more important than the variety used. Nevertheless, they do realize that the use of VGT in the media can have a significant impact on normativity and standardization of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation into naming preferences in Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch for fourteen clothing terms. The study is a follow-up of Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999), in which soccer and clothing terminology from 1950, 1970 and 1990 was analysed as an indicator of standardisation in Dutch. This study extends the clothing corpus with new, comparable data from 2012 collected from magazines and shop windows. A profile-based measure of linguistic uniformity quantifies the differences in naming preferences across the 14 concepts between different varieties of Dutch. The results shed new light on the current linguistic situation in the Low Countries. The diachronic convergence between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch found in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999) seems to have come to a halt in present-day Dutch. On the other hand, the recent data confirm that the distance between the language in the lower register shop windows and the standard language in magazines remains largest in Belgian Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch aan-construction (e.g. Hij gaf een bos bloemen aan zijn vrouw 'He gave a bouquet to his wife'), the prepositional alternative for the double object construction (Hij gaf zijn vrouw een bos bloemen 'He gave his wife a bouquet'), is a post Middle Dutch innovation (i.e. after 1500 AD). The precise details of the rise of the aan-construction remain, however, understudied. It is for example unclear whether the construction really breaks through in the 17th century, as Weijnen and Gordijn (1970) argue on the basis of a small corpus of farces, and what its semantic range was in those early days. In this paper we try to shed more light on these issues. On the basis of a selfcompiled corpus of literary Dutch, we firstly show that the construction was not only already frequently attested in the language use in the 17th century, but also covered a remarkably wide semantic range at that time. Next, via a detailed comparison with data for the 20th century, we show that there have been interesting changes concerning the semantic evolution of the aanconstruction. The structural weight of a cluster of 'do'- and 'send'-verbs for example declines over time and at more general level there seems to be a trend towards more abstract uses of the aan-construction. A diachronic collostructional analysis (Hilpert, 2006) and Configural Frequency Analysis (von Eye, 2002) lends a statistical underpinning to our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experimental answer to a question which has remained controversial since it was put on the agenda in the Romantic era: is beauty individually or communally determined? Applied to our research topic, accent variation in spoken Netherlandic Standard Dutch, this question should be rephrased as: is the perceived beauty of regional accents of Dutch in the eye of the beholder, or is it entrenched in the communal attitudes towards these varieties? Listener-judges rated the audio-taped speech of eight speakers representing four regional accents on traits pertaining to four evaluative dimensions, viz. integrity, dynamism, competence and status, but also on a separate scale pertaining to how beautiful or ugly the speech was found. The experiment reported here confirms prior experimental work which demonstrated that the beauty scale correlated with all the evaluative dimensions inherent in the ratings. This overarching and synthesizing function of the perceived beauty of speech suggests a communal rather than an individual origin of aesthetic perception in the field of language attitudes. We therefore concur with Van Bezooijen (2002) that beauty perceptions afford privileged and convenient access into language attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at mapping out and analyzing language variation and the underlying social structures of adolescents in a part of the province North Brabant, The Netherlands. It presents the findings of a study that was conducted in 2010 at two Dutch high schools, in a large college in the town of Uden and in a much smaller school in the peripheral village of Mill. Twelve video recordings were made of Brabantish boys and girls aged 15 and 16, who were having spontaneous conversations in their spare time at school. Additionally a written survey was made of social and cultural characteristics. We sketched profiles of our 38 informants, consisting of features such as locality, ethnicity, language use, language attitude, cultural behavior, and political opinion. We could form only one cluster of three informants that shared relating characteristics. Diversity and variability seems to reach such a degree that stereotypes are not or hardly applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will investigate the relation between regiolect formation and the emergence of tussentaal ('interlanguage') in Flanders. More in particular, we will try to find out to what extent tussentaal is the product of regiolect formation as defined by Hoppenbrouwers (1990) and Hinskens (1993, 1996). In all Flemish regions a supra-regional interlanguage is gaining ground, with an indisputable Brabantic character. As for the intra-regional communication, the situation is different in the three regions under consideration. In the Brabantic region the traditional dialects are on the decline, except for the Antwerp city dialect, which - more than any other dialect - contributes to the formation of the Brabantic regiolect. In the West-Flemish region the traditional dialects are still fairly vital, but nevertheless a West-Flemish regiolect seems to be emerging too. In the East-Flemish region people tend to switch directly from the traditional dialects to the interlanguage. There seems to be no such thing as an East-Flemish regiolect. This regiospecific dynamics between dialect, regiolect (if any) and interlanguage makes for a very complex situation of language variation in Flanders today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February, 16, 2006 , the website PLAntennamen in de Nederlandse Dialecten was launched ('plant names in the Dutch dialects', or PLAND), which contains over 300.000 tokens, and which is potentially the biggest database of its kind worldwide. This paper provides a description of the history of PLAND, its contents and the interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch dialectologist Weijnen was a central figure in the instigation and development of the Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE). This paper discusses the role of comparative dialect syntax in Weijnen's work and the ALE and compares this with modern comparative dialect syntax research. One main conclusion is that collecting comparative dialect syntax data on a large scale requires a theoretical perspective to guide and restrict the descriptive questions to be asked. A second main conclusion is that modern technological developments can make large comparative dialect syntactic data sets accessible to the research community. Consequently, it becomes possible to test hypothesized correlations quantitatively. A precondition for such an enhancement of the empirical basis of comparative syntactic research is of course extensive and intensive systematic data collection in as many language areas as possible. Most of this work still has to begin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, the paper legacy of Toon Weijnen, as stored and made digitally searchable in the library and archives of the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, is described. Weijnen's library is a refl ection of the entire state of Dutch dialectology until the fi nal decade of last century. His scientifi c correspondence includes almost 2000 letters from the period 1935-2006 and around 500 other manuscripts. But above all this, his students are the scientifi c legacy of Toon Weijnen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the division of dialect areas in the Dutch province North-Brabant, as proposed by Weijnen, predominantly in his dissertation (1937). The spread of dialect phenomena as described in more recent research results, such as Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten ('Dictionary of the Brabantic Dialects') or Morphology Atlas of Dutch Dialects, is compared to the isoglosses Weijnen has drawn. Special attention is given to three dialect areas Weijnen has mentioned as 'non-Brabantic'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Weijnen's most important and most representative contributions to Dutch dialectology. Weijnen's scientific work is marked by combining an overall synthetic motivation and a stringently analytical approach. This combination resulted in both stratigraphic studies of the dialect lexicon and innovative insights in the classifi cation of the Dutch dialects. Weijnen succeeded in uniting bundles of isoglosses resulting from geographical studies on words and sounds and subjective, perception based ratings of dialect speakers on linguistics distances between dialects. His work is strikingly consistent, from his dissertation onwards (1937), along his opus magnum, Nederlandse Dialectkunde (1958 en 1966), and up to and including his 1999 study on the old lexical layers in the south-central dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the perception of most of the Flemish sociolinguists the contours of a more or less stabilizing intermediary linguistic variety (so-called 'tussentaal') are taking shape between the traditional dialect and the Belgian variant of the Dutch standard language. This 'tussentaal' can generally be characterized as [-standard], [-dialect] and [-formal] and it is quickly taking over all kinds of functions of the traditional dialect. The process of stabilization (among other things) implies that quite a number of dialectal features are acquiring a stable position in this intermediary variety. In this paper I try to answer the question which dialectogenous grammatical features most strongly contribute to this process of stabilization. The research is based on an extensive corpus of spoken informal Flemish Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many dialects spoken in the Dutch province of Groningen, definite/specific nominals can occur without an overt article. This paper presents dialect data from RND and SAND with regard to the geographical distribution of article deletion in a number of syntactic/semantic environments. The reduction and loss of the article de ('the-NN') can be related to the status of schwa in Groningen dialects. This vowel easily disappears and has a weakening effect on the preceding consonants. Even though there is no phonological trigger for deletion of the article with neuter nouns, in a number of dialects the use of null articles is extended to such nouns. We discuss the relevance of a number of explanatory factors proposed in the literature to the evolution of the Groningen null article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch has developed a number of innovative plural pronouns, most of which are historically compounds of older pronouns and a form of the noun lieden or lui 'men'. Examples are found in the first person plural (e.g. wullie 'we' < wij + lieden), the second person plural (e.g. gieder 'you (plural)' < gij + lieder, and also Standard Dutch jullie) and the third person plural (e.g. zulder 'they' < zij + lieder). With extensive corpus data, it is shown that the compounds with lieden have emerged in the 13th century or even earlier, in the south west of the Dutch language area, and simultaneously in all grammatical persons. The third person plural oblique forms hen and hun 'them/their' are Brabantic in origin. This paper traces down the distribution of these forms from the thirteenth to the 18th century, in three dialect regions, viz. Flanders, Brabant and Holland. The most important observation is that the success with which an innovative form diffuses, crucially depends on the form's place in the pronominal paradigm: pronouns filling a 'gap' in the pronominal paradigm, typically a homophony between singular and plural (i.e. a 'horizontal homophony in Cysouw's 2003 terms), diffuse more easily than forms without a disambiguating function (contra, e.g. Lass 1980:75-80 and Croft 2000:69-70). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relation between theory and data in the domain of subject doubling in Dutch dialects. We argue that in this particular empirical domain what you see is not necessarily what you get. This means that in order to be able to make claims about a certain dialect, it is sometimes fruitful (or even necessary) to look at a different dialect. We also discuss and respond to a number of specific objections made by Haegeman (2004) against the analysis of subject doubling outlined in Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the project "digital databases and digital tools for WBD and WLD" (Dsquare) the dialect data published by the dictionary project Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten (WBD) has been digitised. In this paper we analyse the WBD data using cluster analyses in order to see if we can find detailed dialect patterns in Brabant based on lexical data only. We compare the dialect patterns that we find with the detailed dialect map of Belemans & Goossens (2000). Special attention is given to the characteristics of the raw WBD data and how to cope with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the semantic map methodology from typology is used to explore lexical variation. Building on Swanenberg's (2000) study of bird's names in southern Dutch dialects, I construct semantic maps for thrushes, larks, tits, sparrows and swallows. In this way the patterns of variation that we find in dialect dictionaries might reveal aspects of the conceptual structure that underlies and constrains this variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard Dutch exhibits an intriguing case of synchronic word order variation: in the subordinate clause both the word order auxiliary - past participle and past participle - auxiliary exists without any clear difference in meaning or function. The present paper focuses on the diachronic development of this type of variation. A case study of word order variation in the have perfect in a corpus of historical texts dating from the thirteenth until the twentieth century reveals two major verb order changes (1) in the late thirteenth century, the order have - past participle is dominant, but it gradually disappears in the fourteenth and fifteenth century (2) this tendency is reversed in the sixteenth century as the order have - past participle gradually increases in frequency until the present day. In addition to the diachronic description of verb order patterns, a first attempt is made to relate the changing verb order in Middle Dutch to more global patterns of syntactic reorganisation, i.e. the development of the have perfect and the changing word order in the subordinate clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, t-deletion as a linguistic phenomenon has received quite some attention in the literature (cf. Goeman 1999, De Wulf & Taeldeman 2006, inter alia). In this paper I want to make a contribution to the study of this phenomenon by focussing on the possibilities of t-deletion in the south-west of Belgian Limburg, more specifically in Haspengouw. On the basis of data taken from my undergraduate dissertation, I will foreground Haspengouw as an interesting area with respect to the study of t-deletion and sketch the factors which play a role in the deletion of the final -t. After situating the investigated area, an overview of word internal deletion will be provided. Within this set-up, two conditioning factors are examined: (1) the phonological left side of -t and (2) the grammatical status of -t. The data will be further supported with material from the FAND (Fonologische Atlas van de Nederlandse Diaclecten) and the RND (Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen). In the third part, the focus is shifted to word external deletion. In this particular section, the discussion mainly relies on data from the FAND and the RND. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the infinitival V2-construction in Middle Dutch and the so-called IpI construction in modern Frisian are compared. It is concluded that the Frisian construction is a finite counterpart of the infinitival Middle-Dutch construction. While Middle-Dutch IV2 realizes a hortative infinitive, the Frisian construction is a finite subjunctive construction. While this construction was limited to intensional subjunctives in older stages of Frisian, it was generalized over the two types of embedded subjunctives: intensional subjunctives and polarity subjunctives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Drenthe verdicts over the period 1399-1405. The earlier finding by Van der Horst & Van der Wal (1978) that clitic drop is delayed in embedded contexts is not confirmed. Only when we make a distinction between lexical verbs and auxiliary verbs, the effect shows up in the case of lexical verbs. Clitic drop with auxiliary verbs, on the other hand, behaves in an opposite way: while neg-drop seems to be underway for auxiliaries in C and lexical verbs in clausefinal position, ne/en is absent with lexical verbs in C-position and auxilary verbs in clause final position. We argue that both effects are realisations of one process of morphological blocking. This is an absolute process. This process is similar in nature to the situation in English where the negator not/n't only combines with auxiliaries. This is often attributed to verb position in English: auxiliaries in the middle field, lexical verbs in VP. In a similar way it is possible to relate absolute drop to positional effects in Middle-Drentish: it is argued that non-realization of the neg-clitic is related to verb movement (Verb Second or Verb Raising). Particle verbs are used as a testing ground for the hypothesis. Apart from this absolute effect, there is an optional process of neg-drop that is argued to be the consequence of language contact. A crucial assumption in this article is that Middle-Drentish distinguishes auxiliary verbs and lexical verbs categorically, whereas no such distinction is present in other varieties of Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gothic ga-, in origin a derivational verbal prefix on a par with prefixes like Modern Dutch ont-, be- and ver-, and the ancestor of Dutch and German ge-, shows the beginnings of a new use which was no longer derivational (altering the aktionsart of the verb) but inflectional (perfective aspect). Postma (2002) notes that its Middle Dutch form, ghe-, seems to have developed into a prefix that transforms a following verb into a negative polarity item. Our paper tries to account for this development by pointing out possible routes for such a reinterpretation, the most significant of which is the appearance of ghe- as a marker on the infinitive after specific modals, which we argue to have arisen out of a need for marking modals expressing dynamic modality as lexical verbs rather than auxiliaries - which the other modals, epistemic and deontic, were grammaticalizing into. The dialect of Brabant turned out to have reinterpreted KUNNEN as a negative polarity verb, partnered by MOGEN as HOEVEN is partnered by MOETEN in Modern Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper is the structure of lexical variation in a relatively small language area in the ethnobiological domain. In this field lexical variation can be copious and one might wonder why there are so many different names for a certain notion, especially when there is only one name for other notions ('skylark' in contradistinction to 'bird'). To answer such a question one would have to find out: - what is the structure of lexical variation in the denomination of flora and fauna? - which word building processes underlie lexical variation? - and which motives for denomination can be identified? These topics are given attention by explaining the etymology of the various ethnobiological terms and by ordering and analysing the words on their morphological and on their semantic structure. In the first place the names of three species of song-birds in the Brabant dialects will be given heed and secondly the names of six species of herbaceous plants in the Brabant dialects will come to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on minority languages in a multicultural context from a phenomenological, demographic, and sociolinguistic perspective. From a phenomenological perspective (1), attention is paid to the relationship between language, ethnicity, and identity, and to the stereotyping of such concepts as "foreigners" and "integration". From a demographic perspective (2), the utilization and effects of different criteria for the definition and identification of multicultural (school) population groups are taken into account, in particular the criteria of nationality, birth-country, ethnicity, and home language use. From a sociolinguistic perspective (3), data will be presented on the distribution and vitality of immigrant minority languages amongst pupils in Dutch primary and secondary schools. Moreover, outcomes on the vitality of immigrant and regional minority languages in the Netherlands are put in comparative perspective (4). With respect to the latter, the focus is on the vitality of Frisian in the city of Leeuwarden and the local dialect in the city of Maastricht. It will be shown that the vitality of Maastrichts has a remarkably strong position amongst the spectrum of minority languages that will be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once the Frisian language was spoken in a far greater area than nowadays. Since the 19th century some notice exists about a former presence of Frisian in the present Dutch provinces of North and perhaps even South Holland. By a lack of written Frisian language material from that region, there is very little knowledge of that branch of Frisian but by indirect evidence of relics in the dialects and toponyms of Holland. In this paper some citations and quotes from Dutch books and plays from the early 17th century are evaluated on their linguistic origin. The author tries to assign them to one of the presumed linguistic entities in Holland at that time: emerging Standard Dutch, the colloquial vernacular of Holland of that time and possibly in the third place the genuine Frisian of Holland. It appears that purely linguistically the concerning quotes from the play Griane by G.A. Bredero (1616) and a proverb by R. Visscher (1614) are most likely to be Frisian. By comparison with the dialects of Holland, both at that time and later on, it could be proven to be unlikely that we would be dealing with Frisian relics in the spoken vernacular of Holland. The language material under concern is all linked to the Waterland region, directly north of Amsterdam. This linguistic analysis led to the conclusion that Frisian was still spoken in the Waterland region in the early 17th century. In an epilogue, an image is drawn of the trilingual situation in both Holland and the present Dutch province of Fryslân at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the geographical distribution of the benefactiveditransitive construction in the southern Dutch dialects. Whereas modern standard Dutch allows the benefactive construction with a handful of verbs of food preparation only, e.g. inschenken ('to pour') and bereiden ('to prepare'), the constructional possibilities are reported to be much wider in several regionally coloured varieties of standard Dutch, most notably in Belgian Dutch. This is mostly attributed to dialect interference, but up until now, the distribution of the construction across the Dutch dialects has hardly been investigated, the exception being Van Bree (1981). Van Bree's study presents some interesting facts and figures regarding the distribution of the construction, but also suffers from a number of drawbacks, which is why we thought it fit to partially complement his investigation with a new questionnaire-based examination of the southern Dutch dialects. Our findings reveal huge geographical differences. The strongholds of the construction prove to be East Flanders, Limburg and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the southern Brabantine area: in these regions, benefactives are allowed by a wide range of verbs. Within the area displaying the construction, its acceptibility is influenced by a number of linguistic conditions, including the semantics of the main verb and the category status of the benefactive NP (pronominal or lexical). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the construction en niemand niet 'not anyone' (literally 'not no one not'), available in East Flemish dialects and finds it to be unaccounted for in current typological work about negation. We spell out in some detail how predicate negators like not and quantifier negators like noone interact and develop. Within this hypothesis en niemand niet will be analyzed as an intermediate stage. From the point of view of dialect geography, en niemand niet is also an intermediate form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relation between agreement and locality. Following among others Guasti & Rizzi (1999), we take as our starting point the generalisation that the degree of locality between two elements in an agreement relation determines the richness of the concomitant agreement morphology. More specifically, when these two elements are local, the agreement morphology is rich; when they are not local, it is poor. We argue that this generalization also holds for three apparently unrelated constructions in Dutch dialects. First, in section 2, we show that so-called complementizer agreement is the reflex of a local agreement relation between the complementizer and the subject of the embedded clause. When this locality is interrupted by an intervening adverb, the morphology is poor and complementizer agreement disappears. Section 3 focuses on agreement relations that involve the verb. First of all, we show that double agreement is the result of a local agreement relation between the finite verb which has fronted to the complementizer position, and its subject (section 3.1). Again, an intervening adverb can disrupt the locality and cause the agreement morphology to become poor. Secondly, we focus on the agreement relation between imperatives and their object (section 3.2). Here too, the agreement morphology can only show up when the two agreeing elements are in a local relation to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares four West Germanic language varieties with oneinsertion in noun ellipsis contexts. It is shown that one-insertion in Frisian and some Groningen and Northern Brabantish dialects differs from English in four respects: (i) It is optional; (ii) It cooccurs with adjectival inflection; (iii) It is impossible in definite nominal groups; (iv) It is impossible in plural nominal groups. English one-insertion is argued to involve pronominal one with the sole feature [count] inserted in the position of N. One-insertion in the other varieties is argued to involve optional movement of a DP (Northern-Brabantish) or an AP (Frisian and Groningen dialects) across the numeral one. Whether DP or AP moves depends on the morphosyntactic feature specification of the heads involved and the general requirement that a head can only trigger movement of a constituent if it agrees with it on all morphosyntactic features. This also captures some further differences, such as the fact that only Northern Brabantish allows one-insertion when there is no noun ellipsis and stranding of one when the rest of the nominal group is fronted. A crucial conclusion with respect to the feature specification of numeral one in the languages discussed here is that it has a feature [indefinite] and therefore belongs to the class of veel 'many', not to the class of twee 'two', drie 'three', etc. Evidence for this conclusion comes from five morphological and syntactic contexts in which één behaves like veel 'many' and unlike twee 'two', drie 'three' etc. This also explains why regular ordinal formation is impossible on the basis of één. Since it has a feature [indefinite] it cannot be combined with the [definite] feature introduced by the ordinal suffix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]