On ambiguous past participles in Dutch

This article takes up the longstanding debate on the categorization of the past participle. This construction is known to exhibit the structural and semantic features of both adjectives and verbs. In this article, the question is addressed how the past participle should be categorized in contexts where both an adjectival and a verbal analysis are equally possible (such as in clauses with the stative verb to be). Previous research has focused on determining diagnostics to discriminate between the adjectival and verbal analysis in particular contexts of usage. In this article, however, it will be argued that even a combination of all state-of-the art criteria does not guarantee a full coverage of all past participles in actual language usage. In answer to this shortcoming, an alternative viewpoint is developed in which past participles are considered to be fundamentally ambiguous, unless a preference is indicated by additional contextual elements. This inherent ambiguity of past participles is supported by the conversational maxims of quantity that state that a contribution should only be as informative as is required to fulfill the goal of the conversation. In this perspective, contextual elements that point to a resultative or a processual interpretation are only added if conversational needs require the disambiguation of the past participle

Motivaties voor volgordevariatie : een diachrone studie van werkwoordvolgorde in het Nederlands

The central theme of the dissertation is an intriguing case of word order variation within the verbal phrase in modern Standard Dutch. In the subordinate clause, verbal phrases consisting of a perfect/passive auxiliary hebben (to have), zijn (to be) or worden (to become) and a past participles both allow the word order auxiliary – past participle and past participle – auxiliary, without any clear difference in meaning or function: (1) Het is normaal dat hij ooit fouten heeft gemaakt / gemaakt heeft. It is normal that he sometimes mistakes has-AUX made-PP / made-PP has-AUX This kind of variation is absent in other Germanic languages with a clause-final verbal cluster in the subordinate clause, such as Standard High German or Afrikaans. The dissertation seeks to account for the present-day word order situation in Dutch by looking into the history of the word order of the Dutch subordinate clause. The central claim of the dissertation is that the present-day word order variation can be considered as an intermediate stage in an ongoing language change whereby the auxiliary – past participle word order variant is gradually taking over from the other variant. Next to data on the changing verb order, the dissertation provides also a wealth of quantitative data on word order changes within the subordinate clause and on the development of the perfect and the passive periphrastic verbal phrase from the thirteenth century onwards

To drop or not to drop? Predicting the omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future construction

We investigate the optional omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future tense construction. During the last two decades the frequency of omission has been rapidly increasing, and this process has received considerable attention in the literature. We test whether the knowledge which has been accumulated can yield accurate predictions of language variation and change. We extracted all occurrences of the construction from a very large collection of corpora. The dataset was automatically annotated with language-internal predictors which have previously been shown or hypothesized to affect the variation. We trained several models in order to make two kinds of predictions: whether the marker will be omitted in a specific utterance and how large the proportion of omissions will be for a given time period. For most of the approaches we tried, we were not able to achieve a better-than-baseline performance. The only exception was predicting the proportion of omissions using autoregressive integrated moving average models for one-step-ahead forecast, and in this case time was the only predictor that mattered. Our data suggest that most of the language-internal predictors do have some effect on the variation, but the effect is not strong enough to yield reliable predictions

Bijnamen in Kruishoutem

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