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Detecting salient features: in defence of a multidimensional approach This paper addresses the question how salience, i.e. the perceptual and cognitive prominence of language features (Kerswill & Williams 2002: 63), can be studied and explained. Within language change studies, the concept of salience is often called upon to explain why certain language features are more prone to change than others, but empirical data to substantiate claims of salience are often lacking or non-convincing. In this paper, an overview is offered of ways in which salience can be studied empirically, building on the insights of recent perceptual dialectological research. It will be argued that a combination of techniques should be strived at, as this allows to combine the strengths of each approach. Subsequently, by offering an overview of existing hypotheses, the question will be addressed how salience can be explained. The formulated insights will be illustrated and tested by means of a multimethodological salience experiment conducted in Flanders. This case study clearly shows (1) the advantage of an approach combining dialect imitation data and several types of interview data and (2) that salience is influenced by a variety of factors, such as the linguistic background of the listener and the context in which the feature occurs.

In this paper, an attempt is made to sketch the first years of the artistic career of the Dutch writer and painter Armando (1929) in relation to the scrapbooks he made himself from 1954 to 1973. In addition to an introduction to the themes and works of this multi-talented artist, the paper confirms that the scrapbooks, especially the first that was made in 1954-1960, illustrate the image of an aggressive and provocative Armando. Frustration about negative criticism of his poems has lead to aggression and bolstering this attitude in the composition of the scrapbook.

In this paper, I treat Sophie de Grouchy as an important contributor to liberal reflection on the famous distinction between two kinds of liberty. I place her in the intellectual context of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and show it is likely that Benjamin Constant was familiar with her work. Along the way, by engaging with Isaiah Berlin and with Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver, I make some suggestions on the nature of an intellectual tradition worth having.

Recently there has been an increased interest cross-linguistically in how speakers use interjections in everyday interaction. A particularly productive line of inquiry deals with what are known as change-of-state tokens, interjections with which speakers claim that there has been a shift in their cognitive state such as their knowledge, understanding, attention, etc. In this paper I explore the variability of the Dutch interjection oh /o/. Focusing on its use in response to informing turns, I argue that as a free-standing particle speakers use it to claim that the information in that prior turn was in some way unexpected: either because it contradicted what the speaker claimed he or she knew, or because it contradicted some presupposition that was encoded in an earlier question. I subsequently discuss the most frequent ways in which oh is combined with other turn components, showing how it is used to respond to announcements of valenced news, to do now-remembering, and to make claims of now-understanding. In closing I show that when oh prefaces additional turn components such as oke, each component deals with a different action-implication of the ongoing sequence and that oh is used to receive the information being conveyed.

Social (spatial) inequality appears to be increasing in many cities across the globe, and also in Europe and in the Netherlands. Formerly rather equal societies, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, are currently confronted with much higher levels of socioeconomic inequality, potentially also resulting in increasing spatial inequality. In this paper we address these dynamics, with a special focus on Europe and particularly on Amsterdam. We refer to a range of structural and institutional factors that help understand the processes towards higher levels of social spatial inequality, and also pay attention to the potential effects of the developments that have been described. It is concluded that many governments express an intention to reduce the levels of social spatial segregation. However, we gauge that few governments will actually intervene in the structural and institutional dynamics behind the processes described. Instead, a much more pragmatic type of policy may currently be the best to expect as an effort to stay away from the most negative impacts of increasing social spatial inequality.

Cross-age friendships in 25 European countries This paper focuses on individual and country-level circumstances shaping friendships between young and old to gain insight into conditions for intergenerational solidarity. Using European Social Survey data, findings show that relatively few people have cross-age friendships (18% of the young and 31% of the old). As predicted by the ‘meeting principle’, individuals who operate in settings where there are opportunities for meaningful interactions with people belonging to a different age group are more likely to have cross-age friendships. As predicted by the ‘disposition principle’, individuals with more favourable feelings about other age groups are more likely to have cross-age friendships. Neither the Active Ageing Index nor macro-level trust and individualism show significant associations with the likelihood of having cross-age friendships. Apparently, conditions that bring generations together are meeting opportunities at the local level, underscoring the importance of decentralized initiatives aimed at increased contact and co-operation across age groups.

This paper analyses two late sixteenth-century armorials with the coats of arms of the 235 participants of a tournament, organized in May 1439 on the central market square, the Grote Markt, of Brussels. The armorials, trustworthy copies of a now lost original, recorded the performance of an exclusive social category in public space, and express in a distinctive visual way the internal hierarchy of the tourneying society: team leaders, leaders of large companies, leaders of of small companies, and 'ordinary' participants. The heraldic elements that were essential to this hierarchic arrangement - banners, pennons, shields – were actually used during the tournament, as well as the depicted helmets and crests. It goes without saying that these occasional rolls were important for the nobility of the Low Countries, both at the time of the tournament and at the time of their creation in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Inclusion of their coats of arms in the armorials ensured the participants of a place in the collective memory. The compilers of the armorials played an essential role in defining the nobility as a social category since participating in a tournament meant that you lived nobly and that your peers considered you as a nobleman. The two copies of the original armorial in the last decades of the sixteenth century reproduced the social classification within the nobility in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. It shows that the same mechanisms of social distinction still played a role at that time.

This paper analyses two late sixteenth-century armorials with the coats of arms of the 235 participants of a tournament, organized in May 1439 on the central market square, the Grote Markt, of Brussels. The armorials, trustworthy copies of a now lost original, recorded the performance of an exclusive social category in public space, and express in a distinctive visual way the internal hierarchy of the tourneying society: team leaders, leaders of large companies, leaders of of small companies, and 'ordinary' participants. The heraldic elements that were essential to this hierarchic arrangement - banners, pennons, shields – were actually used during the tournament, as well as the depicted helmets and crests. It goes without saying that these occasional rolls were important for the nobility of the Low Countries, both at the time of the tournament and at the time of their creation in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Inclusion of their coats of arms in the armorials ensured the participants of a place in the collective memory. The compilers of the armorials played an essential role in defining the nobility as a social category since participating in a tournament meant that you lived nobly and that your peers considered you as a nobleman. The two copies of the original armorial in the last decades of the sixteenth century reproduced the social classification within the nobility in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. It shows that the same mechanisms of social distinction still played a role at that time.

By means of a comparative corpus study, this paper investigates the rise of new adjectives and adverbs from nominal compound members through a process of ‘debonding’. This is ‘a composite change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme’ (Norde 2009, p. 186). It can be illustrated by the adjectival and adverbial uses of the Dutch compound member reuze (een reuzenstap; reuzeleuk; het was reuze; het is reuze meegevallen). It will be argued that debonding is subject to a series of language-specific factors, in particular the degree of compound cohesion and the complexity of adjective inflection. These factors predict that debonding will be more common in French and English than in German and Dutch. However, debonding still occurs in the latter. This can be accounted for by an interaction of multiple processes. Finally, a specific case study of the Dutch word top will indicate how and which different processes interact in the rise of its adjectival uses.