
Olaf KoenemanRadboud University | RU · Department of English Language and Culture
Olaf Koeneman
Assistant Professor of English Linguistics
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (47)
In this entry we provide an overview of the alleged correlation between the finite verb and the properties of the inflection of the verb. Specifically, it has been attested that in languages where the verb exhibits little or no inflectional morphology, no elements can intervene between the verb and the direct object (in discourse‐neutral contexts)....
Despite the enormous attention that pro drop has received in the linguistic literature, there is no generally accepted answer to the question why relatively rich Germanic languages do not have argumental null subjects, neither is there a fundamental answer to the question why English would not allow them in at least 3SG contexts, where the agreemen...
Acceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the complexity of the wh -filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability judgement tasks, we looked at wh -island violations in Dutch by varying the complexity of the filler phrase and by presenting t...
To examine time-course differences between regularly and irregularly inflected, and productively and non-productively derived words, native Dutch speakers and Turkish-Dutch early bilinguals performed a visual lexical decision task combined with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Target items were presented in two types of nonword contexts to...
Cambridge Core - Grammar and Syntax - Introducing Syntax - by Olaf Koeneman
The generalization that V-to-I movement is conditioned by rich subject agreement on the finite verb (the Rich Agreement Hypothesis) has long been taken to indicate a tight connection between syntax and morphology. Recently, the hypothesis has been questioned on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Here, we demonstrate that the empirical argument...
The traditional account of the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) predicts that all languages that show a DPBE will also reveal a Quantificational Asymmetry (QA). Children's performance on object-pronouns must therefore improve when a QP-subject replaces the NP-subject. These QA results have been obtained in English (modulo methodological differenc...
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 assum...
This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh-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 syntactic...
This paper develops a new perspective on the question of what type of verb movement the modern Celtic languages display, V to I movement or V to C movement. Under the standard assumption that the subject remains relatively low in these languages compared to Germanic languages, this category fails to be a diagnostic, since both verb movement operati...
"Structure is at the rock-bottom of all explanatory sciences" (Jan Koster). Forty years ago, the hypothesis that underlying the bewildering variety of syntactic phenomena are general and unified structural patterns of unexpected beauty and simplicity gave rise to major advancements in the study of Dutch and Germanic syntax, with important implicati...
This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh-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 syntactic...
This book brings together new work by leading syntactic theorists from the USA and Europe on a central aspect of syntactic and morphological theory: it explores the role of agreement morphology in the morphosyntactic realization of a verb's arguments. The authors examine the differences and parallels between nonconfigurational, pronominal- agreemen...
This selection of papers presented at the 20th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop brings together contributions that address issues in syntactic predication and studies in the nominal system, as well as papers on data from the history of English and German. Showing a strong comparative commitment, the contributions include studies on previously n...
Eric Haeberli,Features, categories and the syntax of A-positions: cross-linguistic variation in the Germanic languages. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Pp. v+378. - - Volume 40 Issue 3 - OLAF KOENEMAN
This volume presents a collection of articles reporting on new research carried out within the theoretical framework of generative grammar on the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages. Divided in four main sections, the book focuses on issues of subordination and complementation (with emphasis on German/Dutch and Danish), displacement phenom...
This paper argues that predication theory is instrumental in capturing the distribution of expletives. (i) In interaction with well-known verb movement parameters, predication theory explains why not all languages have transitive expletive constructions. Conditions on the assignment of external thematic roles have the effect that the functional dom...
This study offers a new theory of verb movement parametrization. The author proposes to look upon verb movement as an operation that the verb undertakes in order to protect one or more of its features. It is no longer a movement to a prefabricated position but a structure-creating operation. Output conditions require that properties such as rich ag...
A recent survey of 267 Dutch dialects provides five cases of syntactic doubling, in which two elements (WH-pronouns or subject pronouns) referring to the same syntactic entity co-occur in one and the same sentence. This paper focuses of four cases of non-identical doubling, where two distinct- looking elements co-occur. It is shown that the order o...