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This paper presents a novel syntactic analysis of the much-debated Dutch aanhet-construction, e.g. Pieter is aan het opruimen ‘lit. Peter is on the cleanup: Peter is cleaning up’. We show that the construction’s syntactic behavior varies with the matrix verb: progressive zijn ‘be’ versus ingressive gaan ‘go’ and slaan ‘hit’. Based on this variation, we argue that there are two aanhet-projections occupying different synchronic positions on a functional-to-lexical cline.

Fortuin (2022) argues that the syntactic analysis of two types of syntaxsemantics mismatches in the distribution of adverbs proposed in Barbiers (2018) can be reduced to semantics. This would have the advantage that syntactic movement does not need to be assumed. Although I agree that the syntactic analysis I provided in (2018), and, more generally, the syntactic hierarchy of adverbs proposed in Cinque (1999), needs to be complemented with a semantic analysis, I would like to claim in this reply that the semantic analysis provided by Fortuin cannot do the job and does not make syntactic movement a superfluous ingredient of the analysis.

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het ‘it’: het ‘it’ has a third person (3P) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het ‘it’ is different from all personal pronouns in the major dialect groups of Dutch in that it never shows any case distinction. The absence of case on het ‘it’ makes it possible and necessary for the pronoun to occur in the nominative in a cleft. Similarly, the absence of number in the feature specification of het ‘it’ makes plural agreement with the pronoun possible and necessary in clefts. Finally, we show that Standard Dutch has two subgrammars, one of which has the additional requirement that the finite copula agree in person with both het ‘it’ and the pronoun.

In this paper we argue that verb clusters in Dutch varieties are merged and linearized in fully ascending (1-2-3) or fully descending (3-2-1) orders. We argue that verb clusters that deviate from these orders involve non-verbal material: adjectival participles, or nominal infinitives. As a result, our approach does not involve any unmotivated movements that are specific for verb clusters.Support for our analysis comes from (i) the interpretation of verb clusters; (ii) the fact that order variation depends on the types of verbs involved, which can be explained by selectional requirements of the verbs; and (iii) the geographic co-occurrence patterns of various orders. First, the 1-3-2 and 3-1-2 orders are argued to be ascending orders with a non-verbal 3. Indeed these orders occur in grammars that have ascending, rather than descending, verb clusters. Secondly, the 1-3-2 order is argued to be an interrupted V1-V2 cluster with a non-verbal 3. Indeed, this order is most common in the region where non-verbal material can interrupt the verb cluster.Our analysis of word order variation in verb clusters in terms of principles of grammar is further supported by an experiment in which we asked a large number of speakers distributed over the Dutch language area to rank all logically possible orders, including orders that are not common in their own variety of Dutch. The results demonstrate that speakers apply their syntactic knowledge to rank verb cluster orders that they do not use themselves. We argue that this knowledge cannot be due to familiarity with the various orders.

Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance the development of a theoretical model of the syntactic properties all languages have in common and the range and limits of syntactic variation. When extracting syntactic differences from parallel corpora it is essential only to compare sentence pairs that are sufficiently similar syntactically. We explore four measures to automatically filter out syntactically incomparable sentence pairs: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS- tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. For all approaches we experiment with ignoring specific functional material and other parameters. We evaluate the filters on three labelled datasets consisting of sentence pairs that are and that are not syntactically comparable. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results.

This paper discusses four Dutch constructions in which adverbs occur in marked syntactic positions: (i) Adverbs that occur in an embedded clause but must be interpreted in the main clause; (ii) Adverbs that occur in the main clause but can be interpreted in the embedded clause; (iii) Extraposed adverbs; (iv) Predicate adverbs that occur in the position of sentence adverbs. These phenomena provide evidence for an analysis of adverb placement in Dutch along the lines of the Cinque hierarchy (Cinque 1999), supplemented with the traditional split between sentence adverbs and predicate adverbs (Jackendoff 1972). A new analysis is proposed for the bridge verbs denken ‘think’ and willen ‘want’ in which they move from a position in the embedded clause into the matrix clause.

This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11–6;04) that support a so-called knower-level acquisition pattern (e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007) for Dutch cardinals but show a more complex picture for ordinals, which are acquired around the time a child masters the necessary counting principles and becomes a CP (cardinal principle) knower. Not only is the tiered pattern absent in regular low ordinals, we also see that it takes time for children to link drie ‘three’ to irregular derde ‘third.’ We take this as evidence that ordinals are acquired via rules, rather than being stored lexically one by one.

Recent years have seen an increase in the online availability of dialect corpora, databases and search, analysis and visualization tools (cf. www.dialectsyntax.org). Although primarily intended for linguistic research, this infrastructure provides rich resources for courses on sociolinguistics, dialectology, formal linguistics and linguistic methodology. This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the Dutch linguistic microvariation research tool MIMORE (www.meertens.knaw.nl/mimore) for a course in applied linguistics, more specifically on Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO). LADO is used in asylum procedures as a means to determine whether an asylum seeker originates from the country or area that s/he claims to originate from. It is a task of linguists to make clear if and how LADO can be a valid method, and what kind of linguistic expertise is needed. MIMORE contains three databases with (morpho-)syntactic and (morpho-)phonological data from a large number of locations in the Dutch language area. The chapter describes how the MIMORE data and tools have been used in the course as training material, to introduce students to the different levels of language variation, to teach them how to recognize linguistic differences and make these explicit and to show them the complications involved in using linguistic properties to locate speakers.

The focus of this paper is the syntax of the so-called perfect doubling construction as it occurs in dialects of Dutch, namely cases of compound tenses featuring an additional, participial have (or be). We examine the properties of the construction on the basis of recent fieldwork research, and propose an analysis, whose starting point is the assumption that auxiliary doubling as such does not exist; what we have, rather, is the perfect tense of a lexical have (and be), which takes an adjectival (small clause) complement. Dialects vary with respect to the kinds of complement these lexical verbs can take. Our micro-comparative treatment takes into account related constructions, such as the geographically restricted so-called undative construction, as well as variants thereof that exist in the standard language. Keywords: syntactic doubling; (adjectival) participles; auxiliaries; present perfect; target state; resultant state; undative construction; possession

The Dutch dialectologist Weijnen was a central figure in the instigation and development of the Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE). This paper discusses the role of comparative dialect syntax in Weijnen’s work and the ALE and compares this with modern comparative dialect syntax research. One main conclusion is that collecting comparative dialect syntax data on a large scale requires a theoretical perspective to guide and restrict the descriptive questions to be asked. A second main conclusion is that modern technological developments can make large comparative dialect syntactic data sets accessible to the research community. Consequently, it becomes possible to test hypothesized correlations quantitatively. A precondition for such an enhancement of the empirical basis of comparative syntactic research is of course extensive and intensive systematic data collection in as many language areas as possible. Most of this work still has to begin.

A central hypothesis of the Minimalist Program is that syntactic principles are constant across languages. Apparent syntactic variation would be reducible to variation in the lexicon, in particular variation in morphosyntactic features, and variation at the level of phonological interpretation (PF), in particular in the way syntactic structure is spelled out. This hypothesis invites large-scale microcomparative syntactic research, as minor morphosyntactic differences between closely related language varieties are expected to cause syntactic variation, such as variation in word order. In this paper, the hypothesis is tested against the data of the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), a project in which over 100 syntactic variables in 267 dialects of Dutch were investigated. In four case studies, involving complementizer drop, one -insertion, strong reflexives and doubling in Wh-chains, it is shown that most of syntactic variation can indeed be reduced to lexicon and PF, but that there is a residue of variation in the syntactic module concerning the size of the constituents that are copied in movement operations. Two further conclusions are that syntax plays a role in the lexicon in that it determines the limits of lexical variation and that part of syntactic variation must be explained by language-external factors.

This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling inwh-dependencies attested in dialects of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first (or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this generalization follows from partial copying, a process that copies a proper sub-constituent and remerges it higher in the structure. This naturally excludes the ungrammatical orders, as these would involve full copying plus the addition of features, in violation of the inclusiveness condition. The proposal requires pronouns to be spell-outs of phrases, and it is in combination with this hypothesis that the full set of data is accounted for in a uniform way. Advantages over alternative accounts of syntactic doubling are discussed.

Many languages have a suppletive instead of a regular derivational form for the ordinal first (cf. Hurford, 1987; Veselinova, 1998). This paper argues on the basis of Dutch that this obligatory suppletion is not an idiosyncratic irregularity or a historical relic, but derives from the feature composition of cardinal numeral one which sets one apart from the other cardinal numerals and makes it incompatible with the ordinal suffix - th . To express the notion of first , Dutch uses a superlative. Although the feature composition of many blocks regular ordinal formation as well, a superlative suppletive form is not needed if the missing feature is added by so ; regular ordinal formation based on so many is possible. On the basis of a detailed comparison of the morphosyntactic properties of one , many and the plural cardinals a novel feature system for numerals is proposed that captures the similarities between one and many on the one hand and the plural cardinals on the other, as well as the differences between one and many . The distinct morphosyntactic behavior of one as compared to the plural cardinals is shown to correspond in a one-to-one fashion with the distinct mathematical properties of one .

L'A. constate dans cet article la possibilite d'inserer en anglais le terme 'one' dans des constructions syntaxiques comportant une ellipse nominale, dans des enonces du type You are a strange one. Ce type d'insertion, impossible en neerlandais standard, peut se realiser cependant dans trois variantes de cette langue (frison, dialectes du Brabant septentrional et dialectes de Groningen). L'A. tente, dans cette etude comparative entre anglais et dialectes neerlandais, de rendre compte des differences et des similitudes syntaxiques dans la construction de ce type d'enonces. Il essaie parallelement d'expliquer la variation translinguistique d'un tel phenomene, par l'analyse syntaxique des circonstances de l'insertion de 'one'.

Dialects have not hitherto played a very prominent role in the field of endangered language documentation and research - and for understandable reasons. Given the large number of endangered languages, the work that needs to be done in this field is already overwhelming. Moreover, as even a so-called ‘small language’ area such as Dutch is fragmented into over 200 dialects, including dialects in the endangered language enterprise would lead to an explosion of varieties to be documented. However, this chapter argues that there are compelling reasons to include them. To make the documentation and analysis of dialects feasible, an online research infrastructure is needed, where linguists can store and access the relevant data and where they can co-operate in the description and analysis of these data. This chapter describes the European Dialect Syntax project (2005-2112) (hereafter, Edisyn), which attempts to establish a documentation and research infrastructure for the (endangered) dialects of Europe (and beyond). Its main focus is on syntactic variation. The new technology used by Edisyn provides access to large amounts of dialect data that were previously not available to the linguist.

De Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (SAND) geeft een gedetailleerd overzicht van e verrassend rijke syntactische variatie in 267 dialecten van het Nederlands aan het begin van de 21ste eeuw. Op meer dan 200 kleurenkaarten wordt de geografische distributie van ruim 100 syntactische variabelen getoond. Veel van deze variabelen zijn afwezig in de standaardtaal en daarom van groot descriptief en theoretisch belang. Bij elke kaart wordt een state-of-the-art taalkundige bechrijving gegeven van de afgebeelde variabele tegen de achtergrond van historische ontwikkelingen en de resultaten van modern syntactisch onderzoek. Deel I (2005) gaat over voegwoorden en voegwoordvervoeging, subjectpronomina, subjectverdubbeling en subjectclitisering na ja/nee, reflexieve en reciproke voornaamwoorden, relatiefzinnen, vraagwoordverdubbeling en topicalisatie. Deel II gaat over twee- en drieledige werkwoordsclusters, doorbreking van werkwoordclusters, extrapositie en te in verbale clusters, hulpwerkwoordselectie, doen-insertie, en negatie en kwantificatie.

The syntax of natural language can be defined as the set of rules or principles according to which morphosyntactic features are combined into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, and phrases into sentences. From this point of view, syntactic doubling is an unexpected phenomenon. In syntactic doubling, a constituent (i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word, or phrase) is expressed two or more times. Modern syntactic research has primarily focused on idealized idiolects, often standard languages. Doubling in adjectival phrases is found in comparative and superlative constructions. Preposition doubling is found in many language varieties. In wh-pronoun doubling a wh-constituent is doubled by another wh-constituent. In some languages, focus particles such as just, only, already, even can double. One function of doubling that has been suggested now and then in the literature is reinforcement of a phonetically weak or weakened element. Keywords: modern syntactic research; morpheme; morphosyntactic features; syntactic doubling; wh-constituent

The Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND) corpus is one of the outputs of a large-scale dialect syntax project conducted between 2000 and 2003 in The Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium and France.1 The goal of the project was twofold: 1. To create an electronic atlas serving as a tool for linguistic research. This freely accessible web-based dynamic atlas (DynaSand; http:// www.meertens.nl/sand/)consists of a data corpus, a user-friendly search engine and cartographic software for the online generation of maps. It contains data from 267 dialects collected in oral and telephone interviews and in a postal survey. 2. To produce a more traditional printed atlas that visualizes syntactic variation in the dialects of Dutch. Every map in the atlas is provided with: (a) a linguistic description of specific syntactic variables, (b) a discussion of the attested geographical distribution (including a diachronic perspective when that is applicable), and (c) a bibliography. Volume I (Barbiers et al. appeared in June 2005. Volume II is expected to appear in 2007).

Available in a Dutch and English Edition, the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects provides a detailed overview of the surprisingly rich syntactic variation found in 267 dialects of Dutch at the beginning of the 21th century. 200 full color maps show the geographic distribution of more than 100 syntactic variables. Many of these variables involve phenomena that are absent from the standard language and thus of great descriptive and theoretical importance. A state-of-the art linguistic commentary accompanies each map, taking into account the results of modern syntactic research, as well as historical developments. Volume I includes (a.o.) subject pronouns and pronoun doubling, the anaphoric system, expletive pronouns, complementizer agreement, yes/no agreement, complementizer doubling, question word doubling, relative clauses and topicalisation. Volume II (Fall 2006) includes (a.o.) word order in verb clusters, the Infinitivus pro Participio effect, the Participium pro Infinitivo effect, perfective participle doubling, the Imperative pro Infinitivo effect, DO-support, negative particles, negative concord and negative quantifiers. Further information on the SAND can be found at: "www.meertens.knaw.nl/projecten/SAND">www.meertens.knaw.nl/projecten/SAND