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Being mixed categories, participles can be fully verbal, fully adjectival, but they can also have a mixed interpretation, viz. as resultatives, which are considered to be a second adjectival type, one that is the result of an event. Parallel to the two types of adjectival participles and the eventive one, a second type of eventive participle has been distinguished, one with an ‘eventive property’ reading. These four interpretations have been distinguished on the basis of Germanic languages, partly determined by the prenominal or postnominal position of the participle within the noun phrase. In this paper it is argued, based on the combination of the adverbs of degree tres “very” and beaucoup “much” with passive/past participles in French, that participles can also have the four interpretations in Romance.

The rich Germanic adjectival inflection dramatically eroded in the history of Dutch as part of a general process of deflection. At present, Dutch is left with what appears to be a vestigial structure: an alternation between an inflected form in schwa and an uninflected form, the distribution of which is semantically ill-motivated. As a consequence, one might expect that the inflection is moribund and that Dutch will follow its West Germanic neighbor English in doing away with this dysfunctional piece of morphology. This is not what is happening, though. Dutch adjectival inflection is remarkably resilient. In this article it is argued that this resilience is due to refunctionalization. The inflectional schwa is turning into a transparent marker of attributive adjectives, and comes to function as a watershed between the modification and determination zone in the noun phrase. This account explains many erratic inflectional patterns in non-standard language. The whole reanalysis is a long-term process, which has not yet come to completion, but the existence of the process is supported by a detailed investigation of corpus data.

In this introductory chapter the similarities and differences in the development and the current behavior of the adjective in Germanic and Romance, both within and between the language families, are discussed. A deeper analysis suggests that what seem to be differences may in fact be similarities and vice versa. Topics that are discussed are the emergence of the adjective as a category, the distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, the position of adjectives within the noun phrase, and adjectival inflection. This introduction forms the basis for the chapters that follow and in which current visions on variation and change with respect to the adjective in Germanic and Romance are presented in more detail.

The traditional distinction between verbal and adjectival participles has been fine-grained in the last decades. Recently, Sleeman (2011) brought evidence that Germanic languages display two types of verbal participles: the fully eventive and the less fully eventive one. Using evidence from the Romanian present participle in modifier position, this paper argues that these two types of verbal participles also exist in Romance languages. Next to the fully eventive verbal participle, Romanian displays a less fully eventive structure, containing a verbal present participle preceded by the determiner cel, which typically selects adjectives. Evidence for the lower eventivity of the cel-verbal participle configuration will come from lexical aspect.

Being mixed categories, participles can be fully verbal, fully adjectival, but they can also have a mixed interpretation, viz. as resultatives, which are considered to be a second adjectival type, one that is the result of an event. Parallel to the two types of adjectival participles and the eventive one, a second type of eventive participle has been distinguished, one with an ‘eventive property’ reading. These four interpretations have been distinguished on the basis of Germanic languages, partly determined by the prenominal or postnominal position of the participle within the noun phrase. In this paper it is argued, based on the combination of the adverbs of degree très "very" and beaucoup "much" with passive/past participles in French, that participles can also have the four interpretations in Romance.

In this introductory chapter some of the main (dis)similarities in DP-syntax between the Germanic and Romance languages, as well as between the individual languages of each group, are explored. We take a look at the following subjects: (a) the ways in which the various languages express definiteness; (b) the position of adjectives; (c) the function of the weak declension of adjectives in Germanic; (d) the evolution of genitive equivalents; and (e) the emergence of determining possessives in Germanic. In each case we try to find out whether a given construction is inherited from the parent language or is an independent development in each of the languages or language groups. Special attention is paid to common developments after the languages split up into separate entities, since they might indicate some inherent properties of human language that restrict the way in which languages may develop.

How does Iceland appear in postcolonial literary texts by writers from Denmark, the former colonial power? Three texts from modern Danish literature were chosen, with Iceland as their main theme and based on first hand knowledge of the country gathered through sojourns and travels by the authors: Rejse paa Island (Journey on Iceland, 1954) by Martin A. Hansen (1909-1955); Nord for Vatnajøkel (North of Vatnajökull, 1994) by the writer-art historian Poul Vad (1927-2003) and Raevesletten og andre islandske omveje (The Fox Plain and other Icelandic detours, 2009) by the painter-graphic artist Per Kirkeby (1938-) and the writer Keld Zeruneith (1941-). These travelogues, in various ways, are hybrids of text and image emphasizing Iceland's exotic, insular and primarily literary qualities. Critical analysis leads to the hypothesis that these postcolonial depictions are characterized by a high degree of descriptive stylisation and aestheticism and by a prominent role of visual forms of representation. While decolonisation itself is an issue in the oldest work discussed, this is no longer the case in the two more recent books. Iceland has become a post- colonial landscape, a palimpsest-like space where political open wounds from the past are overwritten by the aesthetic gaze, which primarily focuses on the graphic qualities of the Icelandic countryside.

The words in the Netherlands Etymological Dictionary (NEW) of which one of the earliest attestations is a toponym turn out to be words of (probable or possible) substrate origin three times more often than the comparable words without early attestations in toponyms.

Proto-Germanic long ī derives from either PIE i + H or from PIE ei . In an earlier paper (Perridon 2001) I argued that Proto-Germanic ū has a similar derivational history, the only difference being that the change from full grade eu to ū did not affect the whole of the lexicon, whereas the change from ei to ī was exceptionless. In this paper I will discuss some recent contributions on the origin of ū that either explicitly or implicitly reject the idea of an ‘imperfect’ sound law.

The Swedish version of Taaltrotters, consisting of a booklet ‘passet’, a CD, a film, and a website with more material (both for teachers and for pupils). See http://www.studiotaalwetenschap.nl/taaltrotters/ (Swedish).