Marten van der Meulen’s research while affiliated with Radboud University and other places

While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The construction 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 2001 : 202). These findings were explained by pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the construction creates.

In 2005, Arnold Zwicky posited two misapprehensions about language: the Recency Illusion, or the false idea that certain language variation is new, and the Frequency Illusion, the erroneous belief that a particular word or phrase occurs often. Since their conception, these concepts have received widespread attention in popular scientific linguistics, but quantitative research investigating their application is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical investigation of Zwicky’s proposed illusions. It does so by collecting statements about recency (‘this word is new’) and frequency (‘this construction occurs often’) from a database of Dutch prescriptive publications (1900–2018). I assessed their accuracy by comparing them to linguistic sources, including dictionaries, and usage corpora and other data. Our research showed that recency statements were rare, but that frequency statements, especially using high frequency terms such as vaak (‘often’), were commonplace. Compared to usage, most prescriptive recency and frequency statements for both lexis and grammar indeed constituted Zwickian illusions. This seems partly due to genuine erroneous or unsupported beliefs by authors, but also partly to prescriptive genre conventions and rhetorical choices. Our explorative research highlights the complex usage–prescriptivism interface, and argues for more research into this aspect of language perceptions.

The Appendici to the Leiden University Resolutions of Curators and Mayors form a rich collection of documents from different genres, including letters, statutes and testimonies. Spanning the period between the founding of Leiden University in 1575 until its temporary dissolution in 1811, these documents are well-suited for historical linguistic research of Dutch in general, and for those interested in the relationships between norm and language in particular, as the period covers a key period in the codification of Dutch (ca. 1550–1804). In this data paper, the author introduces and describes the Leiden University Resolutions Appendici Corpus ( lurac ), a single-domain (i.e., context of interaction), multi-genre diachronic corpus of 103,451 words, consisting of samples of the Appendici to the Leiden University Resolutions for ten time periods of 25 years between 1575 and 1811. Both raw data and metadata are available.

In 1847, one of the first professors of Dutch, Matthijs Siegenbeek (1774–1854), published a purist word list entitled Lijst van woorden en uitdrukkingen met het Nederlandsch taaleigen strijdende, ‘List of words and expressions at odds with the nature of Dutch’. In this pamphlet, he condemned a variety of loanwords and loan translations. Siegenbeek refers regularly to the usage of disapproved variants, employing a variety of quantifiers and sociolinguistic references. How well such statements reflect the linguistic reality, however, is a contentious issue in studies of prescriptivism. In this paper, we study Siegenbeek’s pronouncements about usage against the backdrop of Curzan’s concept of restorative prescriptivism. By studying the use of different types of quantifiers, and matching these to a text collection of historical fiction from the time, we show that Siegenbeek’s statements about usage miss the mark for most specific variables. However, when we look at the average usage frequency, we see that as frequency terms increase in strength, so do the number of condemned variants, both for relative frequency and absolute frequency. Based on these results, we argue for a re-evaluation of the relationship between prescriptivism and usage, and a reappreciation of prescriptivists’ frequency judgements.

The influence of prescriptivism on Dutch unequivocally rejected the possibility for language to be malleable. At the time, there was little empirical research to challenge or support this claim. Over the last two decades, however, a fairly large body of research has delved into this issue. In light of this, we review some of Weerman’s views, and discuss new findings of the recent literature, both for Dutch and other languages. We show how new methods and insights have led to a re-evaluation of the effects of prescriptivism. We furthermore argue that, rather than categorically dismissing effects of prescriptivism, researchers should focus on case studies with different parameters, including linguistic level, prohibition strength and time period.

On 22 May 2013, programmer Steve Wilhite was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17 th Annual Webby Awards in New York. Wilhite received this award chiefly in recognition of the Graphics Interchange Format, popularly known as GIF, which was developed by him and his team at CompuServe in the 1980s. This format is best known for the short animations that it enables, which have become a staple of the Internet, especially since platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp started providing support for the format in their messaging services.

The suppression of optional variability is a cornerstone of English prescriptivism. For Dutch, however, it is unknown whether this concept is equally important. The goal of this paper is to investigate which stance towards variation is taken in Dutch prescriptivism, and what arguments are used to support this stance. I address these questions by looking at 236 usage advice items from 73 Dutch prescriptive publications concerning the comparative particles als and dan. This data shows a clear division in the allowance of variation. With the standard comparative (groter als/dan), variation is often allowed, but with equative constructions (even groot als) only one form is ever accepted. Furthermore, the allowance of variation decreases over time. The argumentation that is used shows few patterns, and is frequently completely absent. This indicates the existence of an ipse dixit (‘assertion without proof’) tradition in Dutch prescriptivism since 1900.