DE KRACHT VAN DISAMBIGUERING: NIEUWE MEERVOUDSPRONOMINA VAN HET MIDDELNEDERLANDS TOT NU.

Dutch has developed a number of innovative plural pronouns, most of which are historically compounds of older pronouns and a form of the noun lieden or lui 'men'. Examples are found in the first person plural (e.g. wullie 'we' < wij + lieden), the second person plural (e.g. gieder 'you (plural)' < gij + lieder, and also Standard Dutch jullie) and the third person plural (e.g. zulder 'they' < zij + lieder). With extensive corpus data, it is shown that the compounds with lieden have emerged in the 13th century or even earlier, in the south west of the Dutch language area, and simultaneously in all grammatical persons. The third person plural oblique forms hen and hun 'them/their' are Brabantic in origin. This paper traces down the distribution of these forms from the thirteenth to the 18th century, in three dialect regions, viz. Flanders, Brabant and Holland. The most important observation is that the success with which an innovative form diffuses, crucially depends on the form's place in the pronominal paradigm: pronouns filling a 'gap' in the pronominal paradigm, typically a homophony between singular and plural (i.e. a 'horizontal homophony in Cysouw's 2003 terms), diffuse more easily than forms without a disambiguating function (contra, e.g. Lass 1980:75-80 and Croft 2000:69-70). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]