Daniel Van Olmen

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Linguistics and English Language

This article extends the study of (a)symmetries in negation to the domain of (negative) imperatives. It examines a balanced sample of the world's languages for distinctions in tense, direction/location and intersubjectivity and observes that, like with asymmetry in standard negation, they are often neutralized from positive to negative but not vice...

This article investigates the forms and functions of adjectival intensification in West Germanic. With corpus data from different discourse types, we challenge claims that German tends to use synthetic means and Dutch is between German and English but more like English in its preference for analytic ones. Our results show that all three languages,...

This article focuses primarily on the claim in previous research that finiteness asymmetry occurs less often in imperative negation, due to its illocutionary dynamicity, than in standard negation, due to its stativity. Its secondary aim is to identify the languages suitable to test this hypothesis, with specialized imperatives as well as negative i...

This article applies the analytical framework of (a)symmetry, previously used for standard negation , to imperative negation in Eastern Bantu. It is shown, based on a 106-language sample, to exhibit asymmetries similar to standard negation, sometimes contrary to earlier claims (e.g. finiteness), as well as specific to the negation domain under inve...

The topic of impersonalisation has received a lot of attention in the literature, but the focus has mostly been on a limited number of strategies, such as the use of personal and indefinite pronouns and passive constructions. Impersonal strategies have thus far been examined using: (i) grammars, (ii) corpora; and (iii) language-based questionnaires...

This article conducts a corpus analysis of insults in the form YOU+NP (e.g. you (stupid) idiot), an impoliteness formula, in Dutch, English and Polish. It argues that impoliteness can be inherently associated with linguistic structures, a claim which contradicts the widely held view in current (im)politeness research that impoliteness, and indeed p...

The book presents the most wide-ranging treatment of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and...

Abstract (English) In many (West) Germanic languages we see that personal pronouns can be used in impersonal contexts. These pronouns are often referred to as Human Impersonal Pronouns (HIPs). This is also the case for Afrikaans with the personal pronouns ‘jy’ and ‘hulle’. Since ‘('n) mens’ as a HIP in written standard Afrikaans has already receive...

The present article examines the broad function of attention-getting embodied by parenthetical look in Chinese, Dutch, English and Italian. It analyzes a sample of the marker’s occurrences in corpora of spontaneous conversations and of interviews and discussions in terms of a systematic typology of parameters of interactional behavior and adopts a...

The present article examines the broad function of attention-getting embodied by parenthetical LOOK in Chinese, Dutch, English and Italian. It analyzes a sample of the marker's occurrences in corpora of spontaneous conversations and of interviews and discussions in terms of a systematic typology of parameters of interactional behavior and adopts a...

Hierdie artikel ondersoek die verskillende strategieë wat Afrikaanse sprekers gebruik om aan te dui dat 'n konstruksie onpersoonlik is. Onpersoonlike konstruksies is konstruksies waar die (soms implisiete) subjek geparafraseer kan word as "mense in die algemeen", " 'n onbekende persoon" of "sommige mense". Hierdie onderwerp het al baie aandag in di...

This article reports on an interdisciplinary, collaborative project grounded in linguistic theory on impersonalisation and visual communication theory on wordless visual narratives. The aims of this practice-based research project are to develop an alternative to existing methods of studying impersonalisation strategies through interdisciplinary co...

Although a lot of research has been done on the use of pronouns to express impersonal meaning in West Germanic languages, relatively little is known about the use of other possible impersonalization strategies. This article therefore examines the agentless passive as a possible impersonalizing strategy in Afrikaans and Dutch. On the basis of corpus...

This paper is the first contrastive study of impersonalization in Romanian and English. Taking an acceptability judgment approach, we describe the functional potential in all impersonal uses of not only the pronouns ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ but also the lesser studied passive. We find inter alia: a similar division of labor in the languages between...

This chapter is the first systematic corpus-based study of parenthetical "see", "you see" and "do you" see in British English. It compares (the relationship between) their clause positions and their uses. The results indicate, inter alia, that "see" is not simply a shorter form of "you see" but also that some conflation exists between the three mar...

The present article examines the claim in the literature that the negative first principle, i.e. the preference for the order negation-verb to verb-negation, is stronger in negative imperatives (or prohibitives) than in negative declaratives. To test this hypothesis, we develop-in contrast to earlier research-a systematic, three-way classification...

The English imperative and its Dutch counterpart have seldom been studied and compared from a quantitative, usage-based perspective. This article fills the gap by examining what three different approaches to spoken corpus data can reveal about the construction in the two languages and evaluates their usefulness. The collostructional approach shows...

In this article, we examine and compare the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. The second person singular, the third person plural and the 'man'-and 'one'-pronouns are studied by means of an acceptability judgment questionnaire and a completion questionnaire. The combination of the two methods reveals interesting descri...

This paper is the first in-depth study of the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: jy 'you', ('n) mens '(a) human' and hulle 'they'. It adopts a double questionnaire approach, consisting of an acceptability judgment task for one group of participants and a completion task for another group. On the theoretical side, we test the different dim...

Affirmatives and negatives raise interesting issues for both grammar and pragmatics. This paper focusses on the Early Modern English negatives 'no' and 'nay', and their role in the question-response system. Using data from Shakespeare's plays and corpus methods, we note the demise of 'nay', and the specific uses and pragmatic meanings of 'no' and '...

This paper studies constructions dedicated to the expression of an after the fact reprimand to a second person in the languages of Europe. Taking a usage-based perspective, it argues against earlier analyses of these reproachatives as imperatives, optatives or conditionals, which fail to capture their idiosyncrasies and overpredict both their cross...

Like its English counterpart "such", Dutch "zo'n" has identifying and intensifying uses. The established pathway from the former to the latter is found to constitute a proportional rather than a discrete shift here. The strong presence of intensifying uses from the start, as compared to the older Dutch marker "zulk", is argued to be due to preexist...

This article compares the grammaticalizing human impersonal pronoun "('n) mens" in Afrikaans to fully grammaticalized "men" and non-grammaticalized "een mens" in Dutch. It is shown that "'n mens" and "een mens" can still be used lexically, unlike "mens" and "men", and that "('n) mens" and "een mens" are restricted to non-referential indefinite, uni...

Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wea...

ʼn Onlangse tendens in die studie van Standaard Gemiddeld Europees (Standard Avarage European), is die sogenaamde “ekstra-territoriale perspektief”. Hiermee word gepoog om te bepaal tot watter mate tale van die Sprachbund en nie-Europese tale vanweë taalkontak op mekaar begin afstem. Die huidige artikel val binne die kader van hierdie navorsingsfoku...

This article deals with the cross-linguistically rare phenomenon of past tense imperatives and, more precisely, with the past perfect imperative in Dutch. With this construction, the speaker typically conveys the undesirability of a state of affairs that cannot be changed anymore and reprimands the addressee. The article examines the two functional...

This article examines the imperative of say as a pragmatic marker in English and Dutch. Present-day say and zeg ‘say’ are contrasted on the basis of comparable corpus data. This comparison, together with additional diachronic data, serves as input for a study of the typical developments of the imperative of say as a pragmatic marker. Further-more,...

This paper describes Bantu imperatival and prohibitival speech acts. The study is set against the background of the formal instability of directives and grammaticalization theory. On the basis of a sample of 100 languages, we conclude that imperatival strategies are limited to imperatives, subjunctives, and indicatives while prohibitival strategies...

Zeg, zwijg 'ns. Verdere ontwikkelingen van de imperatief van 'zeggen' in het Engels en het Nederlands * Daniël Van Olmen Universiteit Antwerpen 1. Inleiding De laatste twee decennia is de interesse in pragmatische markeerders sterk toegenomen. Ze worden bestudeerd om hun intersubjectieve functies en de rol die ze spelen in het vormgeven van een dis...

The article examines the striking correlation of the directive infinitive with negation in Dutch. This correlation is interpreted in the light of recent findings on the form of the prohibitive in the languages of the world and is explained in terms of the negative-first principle and politeness. The validity of the two explanations is further inves...

This article is a synchronic study of the imperatives of intentional visual perception as pragmatic markers in English and Dutch. It examines the frequency of ‘look’ and kijk in spoken language, the types of text in which they occur and, above all, the way in which they are used. On the basis of cross-linguistic data from Romance, the article explo...

This article examines the English and Dutch imperatives of intentional visual and auditory perception and in particular their use as pragmatic markers. Look, listen, kijk 'look' and luister 'listen' are compared with respect to frequency, distribution and usage. The difference between look and kijk, on the one hand, and listen and luister, on the o...

This paper is a corpus-based investigation of the imperatival infinitive in Dutch. It offers an analysis of the distribution and the frequency of the form in present-day and historical Dutch, with reference to the imperative. It also examines the pragmatic functions that the imperatival infinitive fulfills in contemporary discourse. The prototypica...

Somewhat surprisingly, the imperatives of the Germanic neighbor-languages of English and Dutch have not yet been compared in a systematic, corpus-based way. This paper is a first step towards such a contrastive study. Firstly, it looks at the frequencies of imperative subtypes in the spoken part of the International Corpus of English - Great Britai...

En attendant une rhétorique dominicienne de la prohibition (voir Dominicy & Frédéric 2001 pour une application à d'autres actes de langage), cet article présente quelques données et hypothèses sur l'emploi des constructions impératives négatives ou « prohibitives ». Ces constructions peuvent opérer de deux façons distinctes: de façon prospective, e...