Extending Hawkins’ comparative typology: Case, word order, and verb agreement in the Germanic languages

In a well-known book, Hawkins (1986), expanding on an original idea by Sapir (1921), attributes a number of typological differences between German and English to the fact that German uses morphological means (i.e. case) to distinguish grammatical relations, whereas English makes use of a strict-SVO word order. Dutch seems problematic to Hawkins’ generalisation, in that neither case nor word order can be used consistently to express the basic grammatical relations. Using verb agreement as an extra parameter, Dutch can be integrated in Hawkins’ typology. In addition, data from Scandinavian languages and Afrikaans indicate that Hawkins’ notion of ‘grammatical word order’ can be replaced by a more precise word order feature, viz. the possibility to place verbs in between subjects and objects in all sentence types

On geographical adequacy, or: how many types of subject doubling in Dutch.

In many southern Dutch dialects, subject doubling is found, i.e., the phenomenon that one single clause contains several, non-inflectional subject markers (be they clitics, pronouns, or lexical elements). The distribution of the phenomenon is influenced by a significant number of parameters, including clause type (main clause vs. subclause), word order, the type of subject in the clause (pronoun or not), the number of pronouns, etc. Taking these parameters into account, at least eight different syntactic patterns can be distinguished. In the recent literature, there is debate about whether these different syntactic patterns are manifestations of one single type of doubling (e.g., Haegeman 1992, 2004; De Geest 1993) or of two different types (Van Craenenbroeck and Van Koppen 2002). After discussing the attested patterns of subject doubling and their analyses in the literature (Section 1), we provide geographical evidence for distinguishing three different types of subject doubling (Section 1). In Section 3, the diachrony of subject doubling will be addressed

The impact of dialect loss on the acceptance of tussentaal: the special case of West-Flanders in Belgium

This chapter represents one of the first in-depth attitudinal investigations into Tussentaal. Building on a speaker evaluation experiment in which older and younger West-Flemish listener-judges rate Belgian Standard Dutch, Brabantic-flavoured Tussentaal and West-Flemish-flavoured Tussentaal, two hypotheses are explored. First of all, we investigate whether the strong position of the dialects in West-Flanders, and the alleged concomitant weak position of Tussentaal, translate in negative attitudes towards West-Flemish Tussentaal. Secondly, it is investigated to what extent times are “a-changing”: is Tussentaal more easily tolerated in the private conceptualisations of adolescent West-Flemings

Weighing psycholinguistic and social factors for semantic agreement in Dutch pronouns

Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender

Changing gender systems: a multidisciplinary approach

This article addresses various issues in the diachrony of gender marking, such as the origin and typology of gender systems, pathways of change and the question of directionality in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy, and the semantic basis of changes in gender systems in relation to the Individuation Hierarchy. It also offers an overview of recent multidisciplinary approaches to the evolution of gender systems including language acquisition research, contact linguistics, and theoretical syntax