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The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: Pa die ging morgen golfen 'Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.' Here, the past tense verb ging 'went' can be called a 'fake past', since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow. We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbachian (1947) analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

It has long been recognised that phrases and sentences are organised hierarchically, but many computational models of language treat them as sequences of words without computing constituent structure. Against this background, we conducted two experiments which showed that participants interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in terms of their abstract hierarchical structure rather than their linear surface order. When a neural network model was tested on this task, it could simulate such "hierarchical" behaviour. However, when we changed the training data such that they were not entirely unambiguous anymore, the model stopped generalising in a human-like way. It did not systematically generalise to novel items, and when it was trained on ambiguous trials, it strongly favoured the linear interpretation. We argue that these models should be endowed with a bias to make generalisations over hierarchical structure in order to be cognitively adequate models of human language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we conduct a pragmatic analysis of the Dutch utterance-final particle hoor (lit. 'hear'). Apparently, hoor has contradictory uses. It ex-presses politeness (involvement, togetherness), but it can also contribute to the face-threatening force of an utterance. We argue that there is a core meaning that all uses share, which is that by adding hoor, speakers claim a proposition at issue to be part of the common ground. This core meaning will be shown to account for hoor's key characteristics. Hoor expresses involvement and is often attached to speech acts that are intrinsically polite, such as apologizing and giving compliments. Also, while hoor never occurs in interrogative sentences, it can be used with a certain type of directive speech acts, namely those that are in the interest of the hearer or are presented as having shared interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of a personal pronoun. Why they will not be saying hun anymore The personal pronoun hun 'them' meets a lot of criticism in Dutch society, not just from language purists, but from language users in general. This can be attributed to a strong mistrust of the pronoun, given that it is well-known for violating no less than two prescriptive rules, one of which prohibits its use as a subject, and the other its use as a direct object or complement of a preposition. This has resulted in a tendency to avoid the use of this personal pronoun across the board. Despite the fact that hun 'them' as a personal pronoun has the advantage of exclusively referring to animate or even human individuals, I argue that it is fighting a losing battle with the other personal pronouns that are used to express third person plural. I conclude that it will withdraw from the competition in order to commit itself entirely to its function as a possessive pronoun 'their', in which capacity it is unique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directly addressing the consumer in advertisements has a positive impact on their perception of the product. Dutch, however, makes a distinction between a formal and an informal second person pronoun. If and how this distinction impacts consumers' appreciation in and beyond advertising has not received much attention. Quantifying consumers' appreciation in terms of the attitude toward the advertisement and toward the product, purchase intention, and price estimation, we show experimentally that customers' attitude toward the advertisement receives higher scores when the informal pronoun is used than when its formal counterpart is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the authors's response on comments made to their article on typical and atypical type-shifts in animacy. They argue that there is one-to-one mapping from conceptual animacy to linguistic phrasing in production. They say that a conceptual animacy hierarchy is not reflected in a linguist animacy hierarchy. They also explain the relation between animacy and semantic roles.

We examine the effects of morphosyntactic marking and selectional restrictions of predicates on conceptual and grammatical animacy. We argue in favour of animacy as an ontological category with human, animate and inanimate entities representing discrete subtypes in the domain of entities. We distinguish between conceptual animacy, which is a gradient notion, and grammatical animacy, for which discrete, binary oppositions are needed. The main aim of this paper is to argue for a distinction between overt and covert type shifts in animacy. On the one hand, overt shifts are linguistic solutions to type mismatches in the grammar. Crucially, these type shifts do not involve a shift in conceptual animacy. Covert animacy shifts, on the other hand, brought about by selectional restrictions or by the linguistic context in general, do involve a proper type shift in conceptual animacy. By making explicit the relation between the gradience of conceptual and the discreteness of grammatical animacy, and by exploring the distinction between covert and overt type shifts that involve animacy, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of animacy and its effects on language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner's native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle doch by speakers of Dutch and speakers with a native language other than Dutch. Like German, Dutch has a rich inventory of discourse particles and one of them can be considered the cognate of doch: toch. We performed our investigation by means of an online cloze test among 85 Dutch students of German and 76 learners of German with a first language other than Dutch. We tested five different functions of doch, some of which overlapped with the functions of Dutch toch and some which did not. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to have similar particles in one's mother tongue but we did not find evidence that it is extra beneficial to have formmeaning equivalents between the L1 and L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a uniform motivation for subject case alternations that align with distinctions in tense and aspect and those that align with a distinction between stage- and individual-level predication. We argue that both follow from an economical use of case marking that is made possible by grounding. If the argument function of an event participant can be determined on the basis of information available in the here and now, the use of case marking can be judged redundant and suspended because of economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their chapter on word order variation in the middle field (scrambling), Broekhuis & Corver (2016) present a set of syntactic rules (generalizations) to derive word order patterns in Dutch. I will argue that their theoretical assumptions lead to the rejection of some sentences as being ungrammatical, while in my view they are perfectly grammatical. I conclude that it would be better to base grammaticality judgments on empirical data rather than on theoretical assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperatives are usually thought of as direct and therefore impolite. However, imperatives such as Have some coffee, Enjoy your holiday, or Sleep well are not considered impolite. The reason seems to be that these imperatives refer to actions that are beneficial to the hearer only. We make a distinction between two types of imperatives, those referring to actions that are beneficial to the speaker and those that are beneficial to the hearer. We have conducted an experiment in order to examine the relation between the two types of imperatives and how they are perceived by speakers of Dutch. The results show that there is indeed a significant difference in interpretation between the two types of imperatives in Dutch. In addition, we have tested the effects of adding a politeness marker alsjeblieft 'please' or discourse particles to the imperatives. [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]

Indefinite articles are generally used to introduce new or unfamiliar entities to the discourse. However, in noun phrases such as een opgeluchte Obama 'a relieved Obama', the proper noun denotes a familiar individual who does not even have to be new in the discourse. Yet, an indefinite article is used in this construction. We have conducted a corpus study in written Dutch and a production experiment in order to find out the characteristics of this construction as well as its definite counterpart. We will show that the denotation of the adjective plays a crucial role in the semantic composition of the construction, and that preferences for either a definite or an indefinite article correlate with differences in the duration of the state denoted by the adjective. We will use semantic type-theory to account for these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including free indirect discourse, linguistic characteristics of person and perspective marking in literary data, and semantic analysis of free indirect discourse.

For this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the pronoun interpretation of different person forms of different languages.

Dutch prescriptive grammar rules dictate that the complementizer dan 'than' should be used in comparative constructions of inequality. This has been an issue for grammarians from the sixteenth century onwards when als 'as' started to be used as an alternative form in this type of context. In order to find out why and when people choose one comparative marker over the other, we examined the use of these markers in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). We found that the use of dan is overall more common than als in comparative constructions of inequality, even though from a linguistic point of view als might be favoured. The choice between als and dan turns out to be strongly correlated with the level of education. Although this factor has been assumed to be of influence for a long time, as far as we know it has never been quantitatively tested before. We conclude that the effect of the level of education we found reflects the strong influence of the prescriptive rule taught in schools, repressing the use of als in comparatives of inequality. [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]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Joost Zwarts on the hierarchy of configuration distinctions, one by Dmitry Ganenkov on the basic configuration distinctions in Nakh-Daghestanian languages and one by Marina Pantcheva on the common phenomenon of syncretism between Place and Goal directionality.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Stella Gryllia regarding the topicality interaction and order of words in Greek, one by Lisa Brunetti about Spanish and Italian language, and one by Mark de Vries on various types of left and right dislocation in Dutch language.

In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of affairs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. [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]

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be interpreted referentially in most contexts, even in contexts where adults would favor a nonreferential reading. In this article we offer an explanation for this pattern within the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory. This explanation focuses on clarifying in what sense children's interpretations deviate from the adult interpretations and clarifying the nature of the linguistic knowledge that the 4-year-old child will need to acquire to become a competent, adultlike speaker and hearer of her language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this paper, we investigate whether non-native speakers of Dutch use the interpersonal discourse particle eigenlijk differently than native speakers of Dutch. Particles such as eigenlijk are considered to be very difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Eigenlijk might be even more difficult to learn than other particles, because of its complex effect on the discourse. We tested whether non-native speakers of Dutch used eigenlijk differently than native speakers of Dutch by means of an online cloze test in which native speakers (control group, N = 109) and non-native speakers (N = 73) had to choose between eigenlijk and an adverb in a variety of contexts. Results indicated that non-native speakers used eigenlijk differently than native speakers, but non-native speakers did somewhat understand that eigenlijk marks a contrast with a contextually raised expectation. Moreover, more proficient native speakers were more similar to native speakers in their use of eigenlijk than less proficient native speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an online production experiment, we investigated the effect of sentence position on the preference for either a nominative or object form of an object pronoun restricted by a relative clause in Dutch. Results show a significant preference for the nominative form of the restricted object pronoun in sentence-initial position as it was chosen in 95% of the cases. In the original object position this percentage is only 20%. The preference for a nominative pronominal object is considered a grammatical norm violation. We account for this in terms of a combination of two factors. First, the presence of the relative clause makes the object 'long'. Second, the sentence-initial position is a syntactic position that is relatively far removed from the original object position. We argue that when a long object is topicalized, there are too many intervening elements between the pronoun and the verb of which it is the complement. If the distance between the pronominal object and the verb has become too long, the object case fades from the working memory. This then results in the appearance of nominative case as the default case for topicalized object pronominal relative clauses in Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Native speakers of Dutch do not always adhere to prescriptive grammar rules in their daily speech. These grammatical norm violations can elicit emotional reactions in language purists, mostly high-educated people, who claim that for them these constructions are truly ungrammatical. However, linguists generally assume that grammatical norm violations are in fact truly grammatical, especially when they occur frequently in a language. In an fMRI study we investigated the processing of grammatical norm violations in the brains of language purists, and compared them with truly grammatical and truly ungrammatical sentences. Grammatical norm violations were found to be unique in that their processing resembled not only the processing of truly grammatical sentences (in left medial Superior Frontal Gyrus and Angular Gyrus), but also that of truly ungrammatical sentences (in Inferior Frontal Gyrus), despite what theories of grammar would usually lead us to believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument doubling, also known as (contrastive) left-dislocation, is common in spoken Dutch, but it is unclear exactly what triggers it. Earlier proposals in the literature showed that the construction is not used for marking contrast, and suggested it is used for marking shifted topics instead. However, the results from a Spoken Dutch Corpus study on argument doubling with proper nouns demonstrate that topic-shift does not adequately characterize the construction's function either. Further examination of our corpus data shows that at least for proper nouns, Dutch argument doubling mostly occurs when a new referent is introduced into the discourse, but that this referent does not necessarily become the topic of the discourse. We hypothesize that argument doubling is a way of giving speakers and/or hearers some extra time to establish and/or process the new discourse referent in the discourse, regardless of whether it will become a discourse-topic after its introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements—that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by varying conceptual number, hypothesizing that the pronoun zijn "his" was more likely to cause a male bias with a conceptually singular than a conceptually plural antecedent (e.g., Someone (conceptually singular)/Everyone (conceptually plural) with perfect pitch can tune his instrument quickly). We found male participants to exhibit a male bias but with the conceptually singular antecedent only. Female participants showed no signs of a male bias. The results show that the generically intended masculine pronoun zijn "his" leads to a male bias in conceptually singular generic contexts but that this further depends on participant gender. [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]

Two experiments tested whether the Dutch possessive pronoun zijn 'his' gives rise to a gender inference and thus causes a male bias when used generically in sentences such as Everyone was putting on his shoes. Experiment 1 (N = 120, 48 male) was a conceptual replication of a previous eye-tracking study that had not found evidence of a male bias. The results of the current eye-tracking experiment showed the generically-intended masculine pronoun to trigger a gender inference and cause a male bias, but for male participants and in stereotypically neutral stereotype contexts only. No evidence for a male bias was thus found in stereotypically female and male context nor for female participants altogether. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 40 male) used the same stimuli as Experiment 1, but employed the sentence evaluation paradigm. No evidence of a male bias was found in Experiment 2. Taken together, the results suggest that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn 'his' can cause a male bias for male participants even when the referents are previously introduced by inclusive and grammatically gender-unmarked iedereen 'everyone'. This male bias surfaces with eye-tracking, which taps directly into early language processing, but not in offline sentence evaluations. Furthermore, the results suggest that the intended generic reading of the masculine possessive pronoun zijn 'his' is more readily available for women than for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High degree adverbs, or so-called intensifiers, constitute a large and apparently ever growing set of words in Dutch, even to the degree that each generation appears to recruit their own set of them. We address the question of what exactly determines the strength of an intensifier by investigating which factors influence their (perceived) strength. The results of an experiment among over 300 high school students show that intensifiers are perceived as stronger when they are (perceived as) more frequent and also when they are (perceived as) more modern. This explains the ongoing extension and renewal of the set of intensifiers in Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More and more speakers of Dutch use the “object” personal pronoun hun as the subject of a sentence, although there is a strong social stigma attached to this use. In this article, we investigate what makes hun such a good subject in present-day Dutch. Basing the analysis on data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch, we predict that the use of hun as a subject will remain alongside the use of zij and ze, because hun has the advantage of referring exclusively to animate entities such as humans, unlike the competing forms zij and ze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we investigate topics in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). NGT is a topic-prominent language in which sentences start with the topic(s) and the remainder of the sentence is interpreted as a comment about that topic. Topics are identifiable in NGT first and foremost by their prosody: they always form a separate prosodic unit. We show that NGT has different types of topics that can precede the rest of the sentence: argument topics and spatio-temporal topics. Both types of topic occur sentence-initially, but when both are present in one sentence, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics. The main aim of our article is to argue that all types of topics can be referred to by sentence-final indexes, contra Bos (Pronoun copy in Sign Language of the Netherlands: 1–3, Signum, 1995) who claimed that copied sentence-final indexes always refer to subjects. We will analyze these clause-final anaphoric pronouns as an instantiation of topic agreement. Thus, we argue that NGT has topic agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]