Search

In this paper a case of synchronic layering is examined in which Dutch "massa" ("mass") and plural "massa's" ("masses") are attested with lexical uses as a collective noun, quantifying uses ("a large quantity of") and intensifying uses ("very")--with plural "massa's" only--in some Flemish varieties of Dutch. Against the background of grammaticalization, we will first trace and illustrate the development from lexical head to quantifier and show parallels and differences with similar grammaticalization processes which can be attested with many other collective nouns, both in Dutch (e.g. "een hoop" "a heap", "een boel" "a bunch", etc., see Doetjes, 1997; Vos, 1999; Joosten, 2003 "inter alia") and in other languages (see Brems, 2003, 2007a,b on size noun constructions in English, Doetjes and Rooryck, 2003 on French). Secondly, we will examine the status of intensifying "massa's", as opposed to uses of small size quantifiers as downtoners (e.g. "een beetje verdrietig", "a little sad") and argue on a more general level that similar to other languages, but contra Klein (1998), purportedly (non-canonical) expressions of high quantity constitute a fruitful resource for new intensifiers in substandard varieties of Dutch. The quantitative data for this study is mainly taken from the CONDIV corpus and collected from student message boards on the Internet. (Contains 4 tables.)

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the English dative alternation that verbs of refusal such as "deny" and "refuse" are perfectly acceptable in the ditransitive construction but much less so in the so-called prepositional dative construction with "to" (compare "They refused the convict a last cigarette" with? "They refused a last cigarette to the convict"); and this contrast has been presented as evidence for the hypothesis that the prepositional dative highlights the "actual movement" of the theme toward the receiver (e.g. [Goldberg, A.E., 1992. "The inherent semantics of argument structure: the case of the English ditransitive." "Cognitive Linguistics" 3, 37-74]). This paper discusses the merit of verb disposition as evidence for semantic hypotheses about alternating constructions and presents the results of a corpus-based study of verb disposition in the Dutch dative alternation. On the basis of [Gries, S., Stefanowitsch, A., 2004. "Extending Collostructional Analysis: a corpus-based perspective on alternations." "International Journal of Corpus Linguistics" 9, 97-129] method of "distinctive collexeme analysis", the alternating verbs with a statistically significant preference for the Dutch ditransitive are separated from those with a statistically significant preference for the prepositional dative in a corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language. The results of this test provide the basis for a number of empirically valid generalizations about the semantic parameters driving the dative alternation. (Contains 1 figure and 3 tables.)

This article presents the results from a corpus-based investigation of the word order variation observed in verb clusters with 'receptive' or 'semipassive' krijgen 'to get' + a past participle, i.e. between the order in dat hij het boek overhandigd kreeg and the one in dat hij het boek kreeg overhandigd 'that he was handed (literally: got handed) the book'. In contrast to the same word order variation in clusters with the much more frequent (and much older) auxiliaries hebben 'to have', zijn 'to be' and worden 'to be/ become', which has been the subject of numerous existing studies, including multifactorial corpus-based work by De Sutter (2005, 2007, etc.) and Bloem, Versloot & Weerman (2014, 2017), the variation in krijgen-clusters has never been investigated before, barring a preliminary study by Colleman & Rens (2016). A mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of data culled from a diachronic corpus of Dutch newspaper texts shows (i) that the variation in krijgen-clusters, though it is fairly new, is driven by largely the same language-internal factors as the variation in clusters with hebben etc., and (ii) that, in the course of the 20th century, there has been a significant increase in the relative frequency of the 'auxiliarised' krijgen + participle order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts out from the observation that, in present-day English, pity is occasionally used in the ditransitive [Subj V Obj1 Obj2] argument structure pattern, although the verb denotes an emotional state and can hardly be construed as encoding an event by means of which a transfer of possession is potentially brought about. Since the English ditransitive construction is undergoing a semantic specialization process, one hypothesis that comes directly to mind is that the sporadic uses of ditransitive pity are a relic from a formerly more well-entrenched use. Data from the CLMET 3.1 corpus and from COHA suggest that this scenario is unlikely, though. Instead, it will be argued that ditransitive pity – as well as uses with other emotion verbs such as rue and resent – are low-level extensions starting from the verb-specific [Subj envy Obj1 Obj2] pattern, which is thus less unproductive as has been assumed in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]