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Introduction
I am currently working on a revised and extended version of the English "Syntax of Dutch", which has been published by Amsterdam University Press in 8 volumes in the period 2012-9. Co-authors are: Evelien Keizer, Marcel den Dikken, Norbert Corver and Riet Vos. The revised version will appear with AUP both in hardcover and as epub. it and will also be available as internet version (taalportaal.org)
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October 2010 - present
September 1994 - September 1997
February 1989 - February 1993
Publications
Publications (96)
This file contains (numbers refer to the pages of this pdf-file): 1. TOC of the volume devoted to nouns (p.7-9) 2. Abbreviations and conventions (p.10-11) 3. The introduction to all three volumes (12-22) 4. A sample on Tense (23-98) 5. A discount form (valid in February 2015) Hardcover copies can be obtained from: Amsterdam University Press (www.au...
Syntax of Dutch, a major linguistic research project currently based at the Meertens Institute Amsterdam, will be published in at least seven volumes over the period 2012-2016. The work is co-authored and edited by Hans Broekhuis. The aim of this publication is to present a complete synthesis of the available knowledge of Dutch syntax. It is primar...
The present paper adopts as its point of departure the claim by Te Winkel (1866) and Verkuyl (2008) that mental temporal representations are built on the basis of three binary oppositions: Present/Past, Synchronous/Posterior and Imperfect/Perfect. Te Winkel took the second opposition in terms of the absence or presence of a temporal auxiliary zulle...
The canonical view on Dutch scrambling in the syntactic literature is that it is subject to information-structural conditions: “new” information is located in a right-peripheral position in the middle field (Jan heeft waarschijnlijk het boek gelezen ‘Jan has probably read the book’) while given information is located in a more leftward position (Ja...
The literature often makes a terminological distinction between object shift and object scrambling in case of leftward object movement in the Scandinavian and the Continental West Germanic languages, respectively. This reflects the theoretical claim originating from the 1980s that we are dealing with two different syntactic rules. It has become inc...
This article sketches a new analysis of the diachronic development found in many West Germanic languages from a hybrid VO-OV order to a rigid OV or VO order. The discussion departs from the discussions in Struik & Van Kemenade ( 2020 / 2022 ) and Struik & Schoenmakers (to appear) on the diachronic development of English/Dutch, which focus on the ro...
The distribution of Dutch simplex reflexives like zich has long been considered a problem for canonical binding theory and has motivated various extensions and revisions of it. This article argues that the standard binding theory is essentially correct, because the distribution of simplex reflexives has nothing to do with binding at all but involve...
This paper discusses two binominal soort -constructions: twee typen subject ‘two types of subject’ and twee typen subjecten ‘two types of subjects’. The choice between singular or plural subject(en) is contextually determined and reflects a difference in meaning of the second noun. The combination of a plural first noun and a singular second count...
Drawing on the data and history from a wide range of languages, from Atayal to Zapotec, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field of tense and aspect research resulting in 18 contributions on the perfect and some of its close relatives (e.g. iamitives). Different approaches complement each other to shed light on the source, emergenc...
This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A′-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of...
This article discusses the intuitionist approach to the study of syntax: the study of the internal structure of phrases/sentences with the help of data obtained by introspection. Some critics claim that this approach is inadequate (if not obsolete) on the assumption that introspection data are not empirical data and are therefore inherently inferio...
This review article discusses Lotte Dros-Hendriks’ PhD thesis Not another book on Verb Raising (2018). A ground-breaking book, as it provides a simple, principled account for the geographical distribution of the various word orders found in so-called ‘verb’ clusters in the Dutch dialects. It will be shown, however, that the account is based on a nu...
Schermer-Vermeer (this volume) claims that grammatical models have played a decisive role in answering the question as to whether a simple clause may contain more than one prepositional object. Although I believe that theoretical considerations can be very useful in deciding among competing hypotheses, this reply article shows that Schermer-Vermeer...
This article aims at showing that the special interpretations of asymmetrical coordinate structures result from an interplay between the syntactico-semantic output of the grammar and pragmatics, but that they do not necessitate the introduction of special syntactico-semantic means; standard assumptions about syntax, semantics and pragmatics suffice...
This article takes as its point of departure Neijt’s (1979) claim that gapping is a rule of syntax with properties also found in wh-movement constructions. I will refine this proposal by concluding that gapping remnants are A′-moved into the clause-initial position (SpecCP) and/or the specifiers of functional projections such as TopP, FocP and NegP...
The topic of this paper is the internal syntax of the extraordinarily rich palette of Dutch expressions corresponding to English '(right) up to the end', featuring six subtly different surface outputs, differing with respect to the number of adpositional elements, the number of occurrences of a particular adpositional element (“doubling”), and the...
Verhagen’s thesis on the relative order of nominal arguments and sentence adverbials in the middle field of the clause argued that the order variation found in Dutch can be described in a more insightful way within a functional approach than within a formal, generative grammar. This was true in the 1980s, when generative grammar was concerned with...
This article is a rejoinder to the various reviews of the Syntax of Dutch (2012-2016) that have appeared in this and earlier volumes of Nederlandse Taal-kunde. It focuses especially on one recurring theme in these reviews: the use of introspection for collecting data. Although many reviewers are of the opinion that data extracted from corpora are t...
Taalportaal. A new scientific grammar of Dutch and Frisian (and Afrikaans)
We describe the Taalportaal, a new comprehensive on-line scientific grammar of Dutch and Frisian.
This reply addresses Ronny Boogaart’s comments on our contribution Temporaliteit en modaliteit. A general problem with these comments is that Boogaart does not seem to appreciate that we make a strict distinction between semantics (the meaning of the sentence) and pragmatics (the use of the sentence in a given context). The former determines the si...
Part of the larger Syntax of Dutch series, this volume focuses on the internal makeup and distribution of adpositional phrases in Dutch. It covers such topics as complementation and modification of adpositional phrases, as well as their predicative, attributive, and adverbial uses.
Dutch is one of the most well-studied living languages; research on it has had a major, and continuing, impact on the development of formal linguistic theory, and it plays an important role in various other types of linguistic research. It is therefore unfortunate that there is no recent comprehensive scientifically based description of the grammar...
This squib discusses Dutch absentive constructions like Jan is vissen ‘Jan is off fishing’. The
literature on this construction so far has mainly paid attention to the meaning of the con-
struction. This paper focuses on the syntactic analysis; two competing approaches will be compared
according to which the verb zijn is, respectively, a copular...
This chapter discusses the relation between the Minimalist Program (MP) and Optimality Theory (OT) and will show that, contrary to popular belief, MP and OT are not inherently incompatible or competing frameworks/theories. Instead, we will show (i) that the two can well be seen as complementary parts of a more general model of grammar and (ii) that...
This article reviews Binary Tense theory as developed by Verkuyl (2008) on the basis of three oppositions proposed by Te Winkel (1866): present—past, synchronous—posterior and imperfect—perfect. Verkuyl followed Te Winkel in assuming that the verb zullen (‘will’) can be used as a temporal auxiliary expressing posteriority, but here it will be argue...
This article will argue that the typology of verbs currently assumed in generative grammar has an incidental gap; we would expect that besides dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the theme argument surfaces as subject, there are also dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the goal argument surfaces as subject. We will sho...
Current generative grammar predicts a larger set of transitive structures than the six types normally mentioned in the typological handbooks (SVO, SOV, VSO, etc). The main cause of this discrepancy is that, whereas generative grammar investigates the hierarchical positions of the verb and its arguments, most typological research is concerned with t...
This article argues that, contrary to what is claimed by Chomsky (1995), the operation Merge (= external merge) is not inherently more economical than the operation Move (= internal merge), and that the former therefore does not necessarily block the application of the latter. This claim makes it possible to assume that the computational system has...
This article argues that even when it turns out to be possible to develop a crash-proof syntax that only generates well-formed objects that satisfy the interface conditions, filters on the output of the computational system will remain an essential ingredient of the theory of syntax. This does not necessarily imply, however, that the more general a...
This article argues that certain forms of scrambling of nominal objects should be analyzed in a similar way as so-called object shift in the Scandinavian languages. The differences between the intended form of scrambling and object shift (as well as the differences concerning object shift between the individual Scandinavian languages) will be accou...
This article argues that certain forms of scrambling of nominal objects should be analyzed in a similar way as so-called object shift in the Scandinavian languages. The differences between the intended form of scrambling and object shift (as well as the differences concerning object
shift between the individual Scandinavian languages) will be accou...
The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 21st and 22nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Stuttgart. The contributions provide insightful discussions of several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wi...
This article reformulates Hoekstra and Mulder's (1990) analysis of Locative Inversion in more current terms, while extending the empirical scope of their proposal to a larger set of constructions involving displacement of small clause predicates and VPs. The new proposal will stress H&M's basic claim that Locative Inversion in examples like Down th...
This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representati...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Adopting the hypothesis that both NP-movement of subjects and scrambling of objects are instances of A-movement, this article
aims at accounting for the similarities and differences between these movements within the so-called derivation-and-evaluation
framework, which combines certain aspects from the minimalist program and optimality theory.
Introduction: he Branching Constraint he universal base hypothesis postulates that all languages have the same underlying word order, which is advantageous because it simplifies language acquisition. According to Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), this order is VO so that the OV-languages are derived by letward movement of various ty...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The development of the minimalist program and optimality theory has considerably changed the format of generative syntax. This article sketches some possible consequences of these changes for the description of a number of phenomena that are characteristic for Dutch (and German) and have traditionally been the focus of much attention: the predomina...
This article extends the classification of verbs that was provided in Broekhuis (1997), which is based on the number and types of nominal arguments of the verb, to verbs that take a PP-complement. It turns out that those verb types that have at most one internal nominal argument (that is, the intransitive, transitive and unaccusative verbs) have co...
Verschenen in een feestbundel voor Jans Luif; geheel te dounloden via link.
This is an e-festschrift for Jan Luif containing a small contribution by me.
Dit artikel is een reactie op het besprekingsartikel van Sjef Barbiers van het tweede tussenrapport van het project "A Modern grammar of Dutch", getiteld "Adjectives and Adjective Phrases". Dit naschrift komt niet voort uit een behoefte om ons tegen de (overwegend positieve) bespreking van Barbiers te verweren. De bespreking liet volgens ons echter...
In this article, a historical review is given of the relation between the lexicon and the computational system. Whereas in the earlier versions of generative grammar these two components of grammar are considered to be independent of each other, the minimalist program drops this assumption. It postulates that the lexical items have formal features,...
In this article, it is argued that the distinction between strong andweak formal features can and must be eliminated. I adopt thederivation-and-evaluation model of grammar, according to whichChomsky's computational system (CHL) functions asa generator which produces candidates that are evaluated in anoptimality theoretic manner, and it is shown tha...
Optimality Theory substitutes constraints for rules in universal grammar and linguistic performance. Constraints are ranked so that a lower-ranked constraint may be violated in order to satisfy a higher. OT has revolutionized phonological theory, and its insights are now being applied to other central aspects of language. This book presents the fir...
Dit artikel is het laatste in een serie van vijf, waarin recente ontwikkelingen binnen de generatieve grammatica worden besproken. Het laat zien hoe het probleem dat 'Scrambling' oplevert voor de zgn. Holmberg Generalisatie opgelost kan worden door in navolging van Hale en Keyser (1993) aan te nemen dat werkwoorden geen atomaire categorieen zijn, m...
In this article, we will argue that Dutch inalienable possession constructions such as (1a) and (1b) have the same underlying structure in (2a): (1a) is derived by means of an obligatory movement of the predicate of the BIJ-phrase into the specifier of the locational PP, as in (2b); (1b), in its turn, is derived from the structure in (2b) by incorp...
In Chomsky's Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (MPLT), movement is
constrained by a locality theory on chain-links.1 Briefly stated, it is assumed that
a constituent y may cross any position (3 and move to a position a, as long as á
and â are equidistant from 7. As Chomsky demonstrates, this locality theory has
several highly desirable conse...
Les As. analysent la complementation infinitive en hollandais standard. Ils resument tout d'abord la classification traditionnelle des complements infinitifs en trois groupes : om + te-infinitif, infinitif simple et te + infinitif ; puis examinent le statut equivoque de te + infinitif. Ils discutent des conditions sous lesquelles l'Extraposition Re...
In this article, we argue that the so-called semi- or krijgen passive is transformationally derived, and hence that dative case must be considered as a structural case comparable to accusative case. Further, we argue that the auxiliaries of the regular and semipassive are responsible for the assignment of dative and accusative case in the regular a...
This is my 1992 thesis, which appeared at a very inconvenient moment: no one in his right mind would like to read a study on chain-government just after Chomsky had suggested that government, referring to non-local relationship, is a suspect notion that should be eliminated from the theory. Nevertheless I believe that this study still has something...
Verb raising, Tense Theory
