Complementerend van: Een voorbeeld van syntactische variatie in het Nederlands.

This paper deals with the Dutch prepositional complementizer van (of). This use of van is restricted to Flemish (the variety of Dutch spoken in the northern part of Belgium) and has thus far been overlooked by most linguists. The two main objectives of this article are to characterise and analyse this linguistic phenomenon. The characterisation consists of three parts. First of all, I compare van to another Dutch complementizer, namely om. Secondly, van is looked at from a semantic point of view and thirdly, van is compared to the French complementizer de. Before moving on to the analysis of sentences containing van, I then put the data into perspective. As it turns out, not all native speakers of Flemish use van in the same manner, so in this paragraph I discuss the geographical distribution of this phenomenon. Finally, in the sixth and final paragraph the observations made in the first half of the paper will be fitted into an analysis of complementizer van. The analysis I will propose here is inspired by recent work from den Dikken, Rooryck and Kayne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]