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De dochter doet een powernap
Denite article possessives with kinship terms
in Dutch
Michelle Suijkerbuijk,
Sterre Leuens
& Marten van der Meulen
Radboud University |Utrecht University
While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive
determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a denite arti-
cle in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construc-
tion, we performed an exploratory investigation of the denite article
possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed
tweets for kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-
nominal modier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from
peripheral, as . of all selected tweets featured a denite article. The con-
struction was most frequent with descending and horizontal relationship
terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e. terms with a non-kin meaning at
least as prominent as kinship use; Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm :).
These ndings were explained by pointing to redundancy and the comical
eect of distancing the construction creates.
Keywords: Dutch, possession, denite articles, Twitter, corpus linguistics
1. Introduction
Kinship terms, i.e. terms that refer to relatives and indicate how they are related,
are a fundamental aspect of human language. Many aspects of this phenomenon
are widely researched (for an overview see McConvell ). However, an aspect
of kinship terms that has received relatively little attention is the cross-linguistic
grammar of kinship terminology (though importantly see Dahl & Koptsjevskaja-
Tamm ). The current paper contributes to this linguistic area by exploring a
grammatical kinship construction in Dutch.
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00069.suij
Linguistics in the Netherlands Volume 39 (2022), pp. 192–208. ISSN 0929-7332 |E‑ISSN 1569-9919
Available under the CC BY 4.0 license. © Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap
In modern Standard Dutch, kinship terms are usually introduced by a posses-
sive determiner (Audring a), as in ().1
() Mijn
my
dochter
daughter
is
is
intens
intense
gelukkig
happy
momenteel.
currently
‘My daughter is extremely happy right now.’
Following Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm’s (:–) termininology,2every
kinship relation consists of an anchor and a referent. In (), the author is the
anchor (expressed through the rst person singular possessive mijn ‘my’) and
dochter ‘daughter’ the referent. An anchor can be explicit, as in (), or implicit, as
in the sentence ‘Where is daddy?’ (Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm :). Dahl
& Koptjevskaja-Tamm argue that in such proper name-like uses of kin terms,
expression of the anchor is redundant, because the term has a unique referent
in the context. Kinship terms without a determiner also occur in telegram-style
tweets like (), in which the anchor is implicit, but easily inferable from the
context.
() Dochter
daughter
hee
has
haar
her
telefoon
phone
aan
to
hem
him
gegeven.
given
‘Daughter has given her phone to him.’
Recently, however, a new construction has been observed to occur in Dutch.
Although occuring in other genres too, it seems to be particularly prevalent on
social media platform Twitter. Examples show not only an implicit anchor, but
also the use of denite article de ‘the’ to premodify the kinship term, as in (), ()
and ().
() Terwijl
while
de
the
dochter
daughter
even
for.a.bit
een
a
powernap
powernap
doet,
does,
kijk
watch
ik
I
de
the
eerste
rst
aevering.
episode
‘While the daughter takes a power nap, I watch the rst episode.’
() Vandaag
today
met
with
de
the
peuter
toddler
door
through
de
the
#corona
.corona
teststraat.
testing.street
‘To the COVID- testing street today with the toddler.’
() De
the
verkering
relationship
riep
shouted
net:
just:
hij
he
moet
must
dood!
die
‘The relationship just shouted: he has to die!’
1. All example tweets come from our corpus (available at https://doi.org/./UU-
ARLLU). The parameters and collection process of this corpus are explained in § below.
2. Dahl & Koptsjevskaja-Tamm () mostly employ traditional kinship classication
terminology, but add new distinctions, e.g. the one between proper and improper kin terms
(see §.). Because that distinction is especially relevant for our investigation, we adopt their
terminology throughout this paper.
De dochter doet een powernap 193
While this construction is not ungrammatical, it is unusual, as exemplied by the
fact that it does not appear in leading grammars of Dutch (e.g. Audring a;
Haeseryn et al. ). At least two kinship terms, man ‘husband’ and vrouwtje
‘wifey’, are known to be used in a similar construction with a denite article
instead of a possessive determiner since at least the early th century (e.g. see van
Veen ), as in ().
() ‘Hoe staan de zaken?’
‘Best, merci’, antwoordde Daan koeltjes.
‘En met het vrouwtje? (…)’
“How are things?” “Fine, thanks”, answered Daan coolly. “And with the
(van Veen , p.)misses?”
Still, the construction seems to have taken on a new life recently, as shown by
metalinguistic commentary appearing about its use (see Leuens & Van der
Meulen (); Van der Meulen & Leuens (), or the tweet in () below).
() Jongens, columnisten, echt! Het helpt niet om ‘devriendin’ te schrijven als je
‘mijn vriendin’ bedoelt. Of ‘deman’ voor ‘mijn man’. Het is alleen héél erg hin-
derlijk. Verzin iets anders, of beter nog: bedenk een echt onderwerp.
‘Guys, columnists, really! It does not help to write ‘thegirlfriend’ if you mean
‘my girlfriend’. Or ‘thehusband’ for ‘my husband’. It is just very annoying.
Think of something else, or even better: think of a real subject.’
Such remarks imply that this construction has become more salient recently.
However, not much is yet clear about its frequency and characteristics; e.g. lim-
itations to which kinship terms can take it. In the current paper, we explore the
Dutch denite article kinship construction by investigating its frequency in a
corpus of systematically collected tweets, analysing its occurrence per term, and
studying its user characteristics.
Aer providing background on similar grammatical phenomena in §, we
discuss kinship terms in Dutch and the methodology and data used in our
exploratory investigation in §. The results are presented in §, and interpreted
and discussed in §. Section summarizes our main conclusions.
2. Background
2.1 Similarities to other constructions in Dutch
In Standard Dutch, kinship terms are usually accompanied by an explicit posses-
sor, which can be a pre-nominal (e.g. mijn vader ‘my father’) or a post-nominal
modier (e.g. de broer van de buurman ‘the brother of my neighbour’). The con-
194 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
struction under investigation diverges from this in two ways. First, the possessor
(or anchor) is implicit, even though there are multiple potential candidates for
anchorship, leading to potential ambiguity. For example, in (), it is not clear from
the sentence whose daughter is referred to. Second, a denite article is used while
there is no uniquely identiable referent. Normally, a denite article requires the
presence of such a unique referent to be felicitous (Audring b), but in ()
there may be multiple daughters that could serve as referents – the context does
not make this clear. Despite the dierences between this construction and the
common expression in Standard Dutch, there are parallels with other grammati-
cal phenomena in Dutch.
First, the construction is strongly reminiscent of external possession (Payne &
Barshi ), a grammatical phenomenon involving the expression of a possessor
as an argument of the verb in a constituent separate from the possessed item. The
possessee is typically (but not necessarily, Scholten :) premodied by a def-
inite article, as in ():
() (Scholten :)Zij
she
tikte
tapped
hem
him
op
on
de
the
vingers
ngers
‘She rapped him on the knuckles.’ Lit. ‘She tapped him on the ngers.’
External possession in Standard Dutch is found in idioms, like (), but also as
a regular possessive construction in non-standard varieties of Dutch (Scholten
). An interesting parallel with the construction under investigation is that
external possession typically occurs with possessed items relatively high on the
inalienability hierarchy, such as body parts and kinship terms (Payne & Barshi
:). Broekhuis & Den Dikken () show that there are other contexts in
Dutch in which a denite determiner is used for the expression of inalienable pos-
session. However, a dierence between external possession and the construction
investigated here is that the Twitter users construction seems limited to kin terms;
we have not seen it used with body parts. This is all the more remarkable since in
languages closely related to Dutch, e.g. German, external possession is restricted
to body parts (e.g. Lee-Schoenfeld ). Moreover, with external possession, the
possessor is still explicitly expressed in the utterance, just not in the same phrase
as the possessee noun. In the construction studied here, the possessor can be le
out of the tweet entirely.
The fact that the identity of the possesor is usually inferable from context
helps explain why it can sometimes be le implicit. For example, in (), it is
clear that the author writes about their own daughter. This implicit but contex-
tually present referent is also found in topic drop. Although in Dutch subjects are
expressed obligatorily, if the subject referent is contextually identiable, as in (),
De dochter doet een powernap 195
the subject argument ‘Jan’ can be omitted in the answer sentence. That is because
the referent is identiable from the context, just like the anchor in tweets like ().
() (Broekhuis & Corver )Waar
where
is
is
Jan?
Jan
(Die)
(that)
heb
have
ik
I
weggestuurd.
sent.away
‘Where is Jan? I have sent him away.’
Another relevant phenomenon attested in Standard Dutch is weak denites. Nor-
mally, a denite article is used when the referent of a noun is uniquely identiable
(Audring b). Weak denites are articles that are felicitous, even though there
is no such uniquely identiable referent. For example, in ‘I read the newspaper
every day’, the denite article is felicitously used, even though the noun could
refer to multiple newspapers (Aguilar-Guevara et al. :). The construction
under investigation appears to involve a non-uniquely referring denite article as
well: e.g. in (), the author refers to ‘the daughter’, but it is not clear from either
the tweet or its context that there is a unique daughter.3
In comparing the twitter construction to three similar constructions in Dutch,
we have discussed some of its key syntactic characteristics: the use of an appar-
ently non-uniquely referring denite article instead of a possessive determiner,
and the implicitness of the anchor referent. In the next section, we discuss the
compilation and investigation of our data.
3. Data and method
3.1 Dutch kinship terms
In Table , we provide a non-exhaustive overview of Dutch kinship terms,4clas-
sied according to Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm’s () taxonomy. While more
recent and elaborate taxonomies of kinship terminology exist (e.g. Read ), we
3. An anonymous reviewer points out that both with weak denites and the kinship construc-
tion, the condition of unique identiability can be met, if we assume that reference is not made
to a unique object referent but to a more abstract type. This matter falls outside the scope of
this paper, but we refer the interested reader to Le Bruyn () for a thorough analysis of the
semantics of denite articles in inalienable possessive constructions.
4. An exhaustive list does to our knowledge not exist, and would probably be impossible to
compile anyway, since many non-kin terms can be used as such in the right context (see the
discussion of improper kin terms below). However, we believe Table provides at least the core
of the Dutch kinship vocabulary. This list started with the well-known Dutch kinship terms, e.g.
vader ‘father’, and was complemented with other terms that were used on Twitter and in daily
life.
196 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
opted for this classication because of its suitability for the study of kinship gram-
mar. First, we distinguish between dierent categories according to the direc-
tionality of the term in relation to the anchor. Ascending kinship terms involve
family members from a generation that precedes the anchor, horizontal terms are
from the same generation and may involve either family members or romantic
partnerships, and descending kinship terms involve younger generations (Dahl &
Koptjevskaja-Tamm :).
Table 1. Overview of Dutch kinship terms with improper kin terms underlined and
corpus terms boldfaced
Direction Male referent Female referent Neutral referent
Ascending Vader ‘father’,papa ‘daddy’,
pap, pa ‘dad’, grootvader
‘grandfather’,opa ‘grandpa’,
(bet)overgrootvader ‘(great)
great-grandfather’, oom
‘uncle’, ouwe ‘old man’
Moeder ‘mother’,mama
‘mommy’, mam, ma ‘mom’,
grootmoeder
‘grandmother’,oma
‘grandma’,
(bet)overgrootmoeder
‘(great) great-
grandmother’, tante ‘aunt’
Ouder(s) ‘parent(s)’,
grootouder(s)
‘grandparent(s)’,
(bet)overgrootouder(s)
‘(great) great-
grandparent(s)’, X-
jarige ‘X-year-old’
Horizontal Broer ‘brother’, neef ‘cousin’,
neee ‘nephew’
Zus ‘sister’, nicht, nichtje
‘niece’
X-jarige
Man ‘man’,echtgenoot
‘husband’,mannetje ‘male’,
vent ‘bloke’,hubbie
‘husband’,vriend ‘friend’,
vriendje ‘boyfriend’,
levensgezel ‘life companion’,
huisgenoot ‘roommate’
Vrouw ‘woman’,echtgenote
‘wife’,vrouwtje ‘wifey’,
vriendin ‘friend’,
vriendinnetje ‘girlfriend’,
levensgezellin ‘life
companion’, huisgenote
‘roommate’, dinnetje
‘friend’
Eega ‘spouse’,
verloofde ‘ancé’,
geliefde ‘lover’,
partner ‘partner’, lief
‘love’,verkering
‘relationship’
Descending Zoon ‘son’, jongen ‘boy’,
neef, neee, kleinzoon
‘grandson’, bonuszoon
‘bonus son’
Dochter‘daughter’, meisje
‘girl‘, nicht, nichtje,
kleindochter
‘granddaughter‘,
bonusdochter ‘bonus
daughter’
Kind ‘child’, baby
‘baby’, peuter,kleuter
‘toddler’, puber
‘adolescent’, X-jarige*,
(achter)kleinkind
‘(great-)grandchild’,
gup ‘guppy’
* Only ages to were included in the analysis (see Appendix).
A second parameter in the categorisation is the referent’s gender: we distin-
guish between male, female, and non-specied/gender-neutral referents. Finally,
De dochter doet een powernap 197
we distinguish between proper and improper kinship terms. Proper kinship terms
are nouns that have the kinship relation as their primary meaning, such as ‘daugh-
ter’, while improper ones have a non-kin meaning that is at least as prominent
as the kinship use (Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm :). The non-kin meaning
may for instance involve age (e.g. ‘-year-old’), age category (e.g. ‘toddler’), or
gender (e.g. ‘girl’). Terms for romantic partners are proper kin terms if the rela-
tionship meaning is the primary one, regardless of the legal relationship status,
e.g. echtgenoot ‘husband’ and verkering ‘dating partner’. Romantic partner terms
are improper if they have a primary non-relationship use, e.g. if they are terms of
endearment like lief ‘love’, or if they have a non-romantic use, e.g. vriend. Next,
we will discuss which of these terms we have investigated and how.
3.2 Current study
For our analysis, we investigated a selection of the abovementioned kinship terms,
boldfaced in Table . We included terms from all dierent categories described in
§.: proper (e.g. vader ‘father’) and improper (e.g. kleuter ‘toddler’); ascending
(e.g. papa ‘father’), horizontal (e.g. echtgenoot ‘husband’) and descending (e.g.
zoon ‘son’); and terms with male (e.g. hubbie ‘husband’), female (e.g. kleindochter
‘granddaughter’) and neutral (e.g. verkering ‘relationship’) referents. Specically
for the improper kinship terms, tweets were included only if they referred to their
kin meaning.
However, as some of the terms yielded very few examples of the construction
under investigation, we le these out of our subsequent analyses. An example is
mannetje ‘little man’. While this term can be used as a term of endearment for
either a small boy or a male lover, it was used by far the most oen as a deroga-
tory term (e.g. jij vies mannetje ‘you dirty little man’). Vrouwtje ‘little woman’ and
vent ‘bloke’ were excluded for similar reasons. The current research is a work in
progress, meaning that more terms from Table will be included in the corpus in
the future.
For each boldfaced term in Table , we performed manual searches on Twitter
(using the search term “[kinship term]” lang:nl) and selected the rst positive
hits. A tweet was considered a positive hit when () it was plausible that the sender
was the anchor (i.e. a rst person singular possessive determiner should be used),
() the modier preceded the noun phrase (e.g. mijn vriendin ‘my friend’, not
vriendin van mij ‘friend of mine’), and () the modier was either a possessive
determiner, a zero form, or a denite article. When a term was used twice in one
tweet, only the rst occurrence was annotated. Other, more term-specic choices
we made in our data collection can be found in the Appendix.
198 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
Next, we annotated every term for modier used (i.e. possessive, zero or arti-
cle), direction of relation (i.e. ascending, horizontal or descending), type of kin-
ship term (i.e. proper or improper) and referent gender (i.e. male, female and
unspecied). We also annotated the date of creation of the tweet and, where pos-
sible, the gender of the sender. In accordance with previous research (Ciot et al.
; Zamal et al. ), the sender’s gender was assessed with gender-name asso-
ciations and the user’s prole picture. If the gender could be condently assessed
from both these cues, it was annotated as M(ale) or F(emale). In the other cases
(e.g. users with a non-photographic prole picture and/or a username consisting
of emoticons), the sender’s gender was annotated with a question mark. The com-
plete dataset is available online (https://doi.org/./UU-ARLLU).
4. Results
Our dataset contains tweets in total ( tweets for kinship terms each).
Below, we rst discuss some general results, before we go into specic kinship
terms and sender characteristics.
4.1 General results
Table presents the absolute and relative number of times the three types of mod-
iers were used for all tweets. Most kinship terms were modied by a pos-
sessive determiner (.). A zero form was used in almost a quarter of cases
(.). There may be dierent reasons for omitting the premodier, such as
character limits per tweet, and the use of parental terms in a proper-name like
way (for example Waar is mama? ‘Where is mommy?’, see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-
Tamm :). However, investigating this form lies outside the scope of the
current paper.
The denite article was used in tweets (.). This shows that the use of a
denite article with kinship terms is far from a peripheral phenomenon. We focus
on these tweets in the rest of our paper.
Table 2. The absolute and relative number of tweets in which the three modiers were
used
Modier type Absolute number of times used Relative number of times used
Possessive determiner .
Zero form .
Denite article .
De dochter doet een powernap 199
4.2 Results per kinship term
Table presents data per kinship term, from which we can observe a tripartite
distinction. First, for of the terms, the possessive determiner is used in more
than of the tweets. Second, for other terms, possessive determiners and
zero forms are distributed quite evenly. For both these groups, almost no de-
nite articles were used. This leaves us with a group of terms, for which a de-
nite article was used as a modier in more than tweets (i.e. gup ‘guppy’, puber
‘adolescent’, peuter ‘toddler’, kleuter ‘toddler’, X-jarige ‘X-year-old’, echtgenoot ‘hus-
band’, echtgenote ‘wife’, verloofde ‘ancé’, verkering ‘relationship’). Of these terms,
peuter, kleuter ‘toddler’ and X-jarige ‘X-year-old’ (which are all improper family
terms) stand out; these are premodied more oen by a denite article than by a
possessive determiner: in the case of kleuter ‘toddler’ and X-jarige ‘X-year-old’, the
denite article is used in more than half of the tweets.
Table 3. Total number of times each modier was used per kinship term
Kinship term
Kinship
term type
Referent
gender Direction
Possessive
determiner
Zero
form
(Ø)
Denite
article
Vader
‘father’
Proper Male Ascending
Moeder
‘mother’
Proper Female Ascending
Papa
‘daddy’
Proper Male Ascending
Mama
‘mommy’
Proper Female Ascending
Ouders
‘parents’
Proper Unspecied Ascending
Opa
‘grandfather’
Proper Male Ascending
Oma
‘grandmother’
Proper Female Ascending
Zoon
‘son’
Proper Male Descending
Dochter
‘daughter’
Proper Female Descending
Kleinzoon
‘grandson’
Proper Male Descending
200 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
Table 3. (continued)
Kinship term
Kinship
term type
Referent
gender Direction
Possessive
determiner
Zero
form
(Ø)
Denite
article
Kleindochter
‘granddaughter’
Proper Female Descending
Gup
‘guppy’
Improper Unspecied Descending
Puber
‘adolescent’
Improper Unspecied Descending
Peuter
‘toddler’
Improper Unspecied Descending
Kleuter
‘toddler’
Improper Unspecied Descending
X-jarige
‘X-year-old’
Improper Unspecied Descending
Vriend
‘friend’ (male)
Improper Male Horizontal
Vriendin
‘friend’
(female)
Improper Female Horizontal
Vriendinnetje
‘girlfriend’
Improper Female Horizontal
Echtgenoot
‘husband’
Proper Male Horizontal
Echtgenote
‘wife’
Proper Female Horizontal
Verloofde
‘ancé’
Improper Female Horizontal
Hubbie
‘husband’
Proper Male Horizontal
Verkering
‘relationship’
Proper Unspecied Horizontal
The nal group of kinship terms shows several other noteworthy patterns. First,
the group only contains horizontal and descending terms. Ascending kin terms
are almost never modied by a denite article; for these, the standard possessive
determiner is most oen used. Second, they can all be classied as improper fam-
De dochter doet een powernap 201
ily terms and/or romantic relations. For the other terms in Table , these patterns
are reversed; the majority of the proper ascending kinship terms (namely vader
‘father’, moeder ‘mother’, ouders ‘parents’, opa ‘grandfather’, oma ‘grandmother’)
are premodied most by a possessive determiner.
4.3 Senders
Finally, we looked at who sent the tweets. Figure presents how many times a def-
inite article was used by each gender for the kinship terms featuring the most
denite articles. It is important to note that for gup ‘guppy’ and verloofde ‘ancé’,
the denite article was oen used by the same female user (see Appendix), which
could be a probable explanation for the results of these specic terms in Figure .
Figure 1. Total number of times each modier was used per kinship term per gender
In Figure , we observe that, for echtgenoot ‘husband’, all tweets with a denite
article were sent by women, while for echtgenote ‘wife’ the opposite is true. This
pattern can be expected based on the dominance of hetero marriages, but is not
completely self-evident as there are also same-sex marriages in Dutch-speaking
countries.
For the other terms, we can see that mostly women use denite articles
to modify kinship terms. This result is striking as the majority of Twitter users
is male (Statista ). In our results, then, women are substantially overrepre-
sented. It should be noted, however, that of the tweets, . were written
202 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
by women. We do not have enough data to determine whether women use more
kinship terms, are more likely to choose a denite article over a possessive deter-
miner, or both. Disentangling these eects requires further statistical analysis that
falls outside the scope of this paper.
5. Discussion
The results presented in § can be understood in various ways. First, the fact that
the construction is possible at all can be understood by the notion of communica-
tive redundancy. Aer all, in these tweets, we made sure that there was no ques-
tion about who the anchor is (namely the sender), so that expressing it overtly
is redundant. The sender can choose to leave the anchor implicit and express
deniteness only (denite article), or leave out the premodier altogether (zero
form), without risking ambiguity. Redundancy as an explanation for this con-
struction conrms the results of an informal inquiry amongst its users (Leuens
& Van der Meulen ). When asked for their motivation to use a denite article,
senders gave two main reasons:
. A possessive determiner in this context feels ‘too possessive’, because with kin-
ship terms it is already clear that it is about (inalienable) possession;
. A denite article creates distance, which has a comical eect because kinship
relations concern the most intimate relationships.
Apparently, users are to some extent aware of the redundancy of overt expression
of the anchor. Expressing it anyway is experienced as too emphatic, which is the
reason to leave it out. Additionally, this creates a desired pragmatic distancing
eect. The existence of this eect has been shown for English by Hunt & Acton
(). In their study, participants believe that speakers who use ‘the spouse’
instead of ‘my spouse’ have a more distant relationship to their partners compared
to speakers who use a possessive determiner in the same context.
Second, some interesting patterns emerged when looking at the kinship
terms for which the denite article was used in more than tweets. First, we saw
that this group included descending and horizontal kinship terms only. Dahl and
Koptjevskaja-Tamm (:), too, nd examples of asymmetrical behaviour of
ascending and descending/horizontal terms. In their analysis, the more features
a kin term has in common with the so-called ‘parental prototype’ (i.e. a term
describing a rst ascending consanguineal relation), the lesser marked its expres-
sion will be, which means, e.g., that more grammatical marking can be omitted
than with a term that is further away from the prototype. This explains why in a
language like Dutch parental terms can oen function as a proper name (‘Where
De dochter doet een powernap 203
is daddy?’, see § ), while non-parental ones cannot. In a way, our results align
well with this idea, because we, too, nd an asymmetry between ascending and
descending/horizontal relations. However, in terms of omittability of grammati-
cal marking, we nd the opposite: while ascending kin terms typically take the
standard possessive determiner, with children and romantic partners there is the
option of omitting the anchor. Hence, the concept of prototypicality or marked-
ness cannot explain our ndings here.
Perhaps the reason why descending and horizontal kinship relations are more
prone to be introduced by a denite article lies in the nature of the relation. Both
romantic partnerships and relations with children come into existence by choice,
while people unintentionally have siblings, parents, and grandparents. The idea
that someone would own a child or partner is therefore possibly more uncom-
fortable than the idea of possessing a mother or grandfather. This could explain
why the redundancy of a possessive determiner is felt more heavily with descend-
ing and romantic horizontal kinship than with ascending and blood-related fam-
ily terms. In addition, an anonymous reviewer notes that they feel that the use of
a denite article has an ironic and therefore somewhat disrespectful eect. This,
too, could explain why the construction is not used for ascending kin terms, e.g.
de opa ‘the grandpa’ would be perceived as impolite.
Another observation we made in § is that the denite article is used pri-
marily with improper kinship terms. The use of improper terms is to be expected
with nouns referring to children, as these can disambiguate between multiple chil-
dren. For example, if a sender has two daughters, using ‘the daughter’ would be
ambiguous, while ‘the toddler’ would result in successful identication. Since it
is comparatively less likely that people have two mothers, using disambiguating
improper terms for ascending kin relations will presumably be less frequent.
Indeed, Dahl & Koptsjevskaja-Tamm (:) note that descending terms are
much more likely to be improper terms than ascending terms. Furthermore,
improper nouns seem to contribute to the aforementioned comical distancing
eect of the construction: e.g. referring to one’s child with gup (‘guppy’) creates a
funny clash between the love for one’s child and the presumably somewhat colder
feelings one might have for a baby sh.
However, while disambiguation and distancing explain a preference for
improper over proper kin terms, we still have to account for the use of a denite
article over a possessive determiner with improper terms. Perhaps leaving out the
anchor further strengthens the desired distancing eect: by omitting any refer-
ence to the ego, only the more impersonal grammatical marking remains. Alterna-
tively, or simultaneously, there might be a frequency eect at play. Proper kinship
terms may be found with a possessive determiner so oen that this has become
entrenched. With words like gup ‘guppy’ and peuter ‘toddler’, there is no automatic
204 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
association with a possessive determiner, which leaves more room for selecting a
dierent premodier or leaving it out altogether.
In order to better understand the various factors at play, we need to study
more examples of the construction. First, we hope to extend our explorative study
in the future by including more kin terms from Table . It would be interesting to
see how far the notion of ‘kinship’ reaches and expand the set of nouns: possibly,
terms for pets, friends, colleagues, and other important participants in people’s
lives can also be used in the construction. Furthermore, we would like to investi-
gate whether the construction is used in other domains, e.g. on other computer-
mediated channels such as fora and chat applications, and perhaps even in spoken
language. A third direction for future research would be to look for similar con-
structions in other languages, both related and unrelated ones, and test whether
they have the same characteristics as the Dutch one.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we performed an exploratory investigation of the denite article
possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. Analysing
tweets ( tweets for kinship terms), annotated for the type of modier used
(a possessive determiner, a zero form or a denite article), results show that .
of all selected tweets featured a denite article. The construction was most fre-
quent with descending and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper
terms.
We have accounted for the grammaticality of the construction by pointing to
the role of redundancy: since the identity of the anchor is clear from the con-
text, overt expression is redundant. Users of the construction seem to recognize
this redundancy; they report that using a possessive determiner would feel ‘overly
possessive’. This feeling seems to be the strongest with terms for children and part-
ners, possibly because those are relatives by choice. Moreover, use of the con-
struction can be explained by the eect of distancing it creates, which presumably
works comedically because of the contrast with the intimacy of the relations con-
cerned. This comical distancing eect could explain the relatively frequent occur-
rence of the phenomenon with descending and horizontal relationship nouns, as
well as the relatively high frequency of improper kin terms.
Funding
Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with
Radboud University Nijmegen.
De dochter doet een powernap 205
Abbreviations
hashtag
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Appendix. Term-specic choices made during data collection and analysis
Term Choice
Echtgenote
‘wife’
d’echtgenote annotated as denite article.
Gup
‘guppy’
Many tweets from the same user.
Oma
‘grandmother’
Opa
‘grandfather’
Only included when used in isolation, excluding hits with oma en opa
‘grandmother and grandfather’.
Puber
‘adolescent’
Only when it referred to humans, not animals.
X-jarige
‘X-year-old’
Specied for ages to (search term example: “-jarige” lang:nl) to
exclude noise (e.g. “-year-old”). For each age, the rst positive hits
were included.
Verloofde
‘ancee’
One user consistently uses captital ‘V’ (i.e. de Verloofde), and wrote /
tweets with a denite article.
Vriend
‘friend’
(male)
Vriendin
‘friend’
(female)
Excluded when clearly about friendship, recognized by the adjectives beste
‘best’ or goede ‘good’. Included when relationship’s nature was unclear.
De dochter doet een powernap 207
Address for correspondence
Michelle Suijkerbuijk
Radboud University
Postbus
HD Nijmegen
The Netherlands
michelle.suijkerbuijk@ru.nl
Co-author information
Sterre Leuens
Utrecht University
s.c.leuens@uu.nl
Marten van der Meulen
Radboud University
marten.vandermeulen@ru.nl
Publication history
Date received: March
Date accepted: May
208 Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Sterre Leuens & Marten van der Meulen
