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In an online experiment among native speakers of Dutch we measured addressees' responses to emails written in the informal pronoun T or the formal pronoun V in HR communication. 172 participants (61 male, mean age 37 years) read either the V-versions or the T-versions of two invitation emails and two rejection emails by four different fictitious recruiters. After each email, participants had to score their appreciation of the company and the recruiter on five different scales each, such as The recruiter who wrote this email seems ... [scale from friendly to unfriendly ]. We hypothesized that (i) the V-pronoun would be more appreciated in letters of rejection, and the T-pronoun in letters of invitation, and (ii) older people would appreciate the V-pronoun more than the T-pronoun, and the other way around for younger people. Although neither of these hypotheses was supported, we did find a small effect of pronoun: Emails written in V were more highly appreciated than emails in T, irrespective of type of email (invitation or rejection), and irrespective of the participant's age, gender, and level of education. At the same time, we observed differences in the strength of this effect across different scales. • There is a tendency to use the informal pronoun more and more in the Netherlands, also in formal contexts. • The use of a formal pronoun in emails inviting or rejecting applicants for an interview has an overall positive effect. • The participants in this study are the addressees, not observers. • The distribution of evaluation scores varies widely for different evaluative adjectives and texts. • Different statistical models for analyzing the data converge, giving similar results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although second person pronouns are typically thought of as referring to the addressee, we find that in almost half the cases the personal subject pronoun je ‘you’ gets a generic (impersonal) interpretation in the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A further examination of the contexts in which these two readings of you arise reveals that 66% receives a generic and 34% a deictic reading in declaratives, but only 12% of readings is generic, and 88% is deictic for questions. This frequency distribution verifies our hypothesis that deictic second person subjects are typically used in interactive discourse, whereas generic second person subjects are mostly used in descriptive language. We assume that second person pronouns get a deictic reading via self-ascription by the addressee (following Wechsler, 2010 ), but that this reading can be overruled in favor of a generic reading when a deictic reading does not fit the context. The mechanism of self-ascription upon hearing a second person pronoun can explain why the generic use of you seems to evoke a reading of empathy often reported in the literature (e.g., Malamud, 2012 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The aim of this article is to account for tense/aspect and mood based differential subject and object marking. We propose an analysis in terms of an optimization procedure between two general potentially conflicting constraints, the faithfulness constraint Identify, which requires the A and the P argument to be identified, either by case or by the context, and the markedness constraint Economy, which penalizes case marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We will provide a bidirectional Optimality Theoretic approach for fluid differential case marking, in particular fluid differential subject marking. Our claim is that although there is no fixed meaning associated with any particular type of case, a correspondence constraint between volitional meaning and ergative case interacts with markedness constraints and this interaction may result in fluid differential case marking. Thus, fluid differential subject marking is analysed as the emergence of the correspondence between volitional meaning and ergative case in a bidirectional process of optimization. We will argue that this type of differential case marking cannot be adequately explained in unidirectional OT syntax. In a bidirectional perspective, however, fluid differential case marking can be analysed on the basis of the same set of ranked constraints that accounts for the general pattern of case marking. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The aim of this introductory article is to provide a background to the articles contained in this special issue of Lingua that centers around variation in form, variation in meaning, and markedness. Theoretical and empirical considerations are brought together in this special issue in which the linguistic disciplines that are covered diverge. The different contributions deal with language processing, first language acquisition, language contact, functional-typology and generative morphology and syntax. Several papers in this special issue argue in favour of an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the data under discussion. This is not a coincidence, given that Optimality Theory is claimed to be a formal theory of markedness (cf. Gilbers and De Hoop, 1998, Lingua, 104, 1 for an introduction to OT). In Section 1, we present two hypotheses dealing with the relation between variation in form and variation in meaning. We discuss several dimensions along which markedness of forms and meanings can be measured in Section 2. In the final section we discuss the possibility that the concept of bidirectional optimization accounts for markedness as well as variation in form versus variation in meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction [ X, you are/were Y ], where X is a spatio-temporal addressee, is widely attested on Dutch social media. We investigated this construction in a Twitter corpus, and found that Twitter users use the construction to tell their audience about a current or recent experience at the location addressed, while at the same time evaluating said experience. Reference to this first-hand experience is not overtly expressed, yet it is an essential interpretive aspect of the construction. The grammatical components of the construction all contribute in their own way to this interpretation. Although the use of the vocative and the second person pronoun personify the spatio-temporal addressee to a certain degree, the addressee's spatio-temporal characteristics remain crucial, as they provide the background for the reported experience. It is noticeable that particular instances of the construction, which would be blatantly ungrammatical in other contexts, are now acceptable in virtue of these spatio-temporal characteristics of the fictive addressee. This reveals the flexibility of grammar, as it shows how grammar can adapt to the possibilities and limitations of social media use, and make otherwise ungrammatical utterances, such as 'you are raining', fully comprehensible. • Cities, countries, and music festivals are frequently addressed directly on social media. • Twitter users evaluate their recent experience by addressing the location. • The addressees are personified to a certain degree, but retain their locative characteristics. • Ungrammatical clauses have become acceptable, revealing the flexibility of grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]