Over the centuries, the French language has had a lot of influence on the Dutch language. Thousands of words from French entered Dutch and apart from that, Dutch has borrowed morphological... Show moreOver the centuries, the French language has had a lot of influence on the Dutch language. Thousands of words from French entered Dutch and apart from that, Dutch has borrowed morphological elements such as suffixes from French. Moreover, it is assumed that the popularity of certain Dutch morphosyntactic constructions can be attributed to language contact with French. Despite the fact that histories of Dutch often speak of so-called ‘Frenchification’ because of these French influences, hardly any empirical research has been carried out so far on the actual influence of French on Dutch. The aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the influence that French had on the Dutch language between 1500 and 1900. This is done by means of corpus analyses with the diachronic Language of Leiden corpus, which comprises texts from Leiden from different social domains. The corpus analyses aim to trace the language changes in Dutch as a consequence of language contact with French on three language levels: lexicon, morphology, and morphosyntax. In this way, this thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical language contact between Dutch and French. Show less
In linguistic research, present-day Dutch has been characterized as a pluricentric language, meaning that there are multiple centers from where language norms spread. Within the Dutch language area... Show moreIn linguistic research, present-day Dutch has been characterized as a pluricentric language, meaning that there are multiple centers from where language norms spread. Within the Dutch language area, we can discern a center in the Northern Netherlands (the Randstad area) and the Southern Netherlands (around the province of Brabant). Traditional histories of the language suggest that pluricentricity for Dutch is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. However, based on findings from empirical historical-linguistic research, we could expect to situate pluricentricity at least 100 years earlier in time. This dissertation therefore provides an in-depth study in which pluricentricity is put into a broader historical perspective.Through systematic corpus analyses, this dissertation aims to assess the usefulness of the modern concept of pluricentricity in Dutch language history. A total of six linguistic features is examined in the Historical Corpus of Dutch (HCD), a new multi-genre, diachronic corpus, involving central and peripheral regions in both the North and the South. Moreover, by integrating Northern and Southern varieties of Dutch in the study, and by mapping the interactions between the different regions, we want to lay the foundation for an integrated history of Dutch. Show less
This dissertation investigates on-going language variation and change in Abui, a Timor-Alor-Pantar (Papuan) language spoken on the island of Alor, eastern Indonesia. Like many indigenous languages... Show moreThis dissertation investigates on-going language variation and change in Abui, a Timor-Alor-Pantar (Papuan) language spoken on the island of Alor, eastern Indonesia. Like many indigenous languages spoken on Alor, Abui has been in intensive contact with Alor Malay, the regional lingua franca, for around 50-60 years. This has had the greatest impact on younger speakers, who are now being raised in Alor Malay and only learn Abui during or after adolescence. Drawing on methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, the Abui of four different age-groups was found to vary significantly, suggesting that this shift to Alor Malay is having an impact on Abui.This was illustrated using three case-studies of language variation and change, examining reflexive possessive marking, verb usage, and reduplication. Broadly speaking, it was found that the 50-60 years of intense contact between Alor Malay and Abui has led to the simplification of Abui grammar. In particular, the reflexivity distinction in possession is becoming neutralized, certain verbs are taking over others and becoming more generic, while reduplication is becoming more productive and more Malay-like in function and form. These outcomes are argued to be a case of both incomplete acquisition and transfer.This dissertation may prove of relevance to anyone interested in the study of language contact and change, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics, endangered languages, Papuan and Austronesian languages, and language variation in minority languages. Show less
This thesis explores the influence of prescriptivism on language use in American English. It does so by studying the relationship between language advice literature, patterns of language use,... Show moreThis thesis explores the influence of prescriptivism on language use in American English. It does so by studying the relationship between language advice literature, patterns of language use, and speakers’ attitudes. The thesis shows that the genre of usage guides, routinely associated with prescriptivism, is undergoing change to reflect processes of change in progress in American English. Furthermore, prescriptivism and language use are shown to mutually influence each other. Show less
This dissertation provides new insights into language variation and change in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Dutch. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent... Show moreThis dissertation provides new insights into language variation and change in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Dutch. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent official language policy measures exerted influence on actual language practice.During the nation-building period around 1800, the Northern Netherlands witnessed the introduction of a national language policy, which aimed at the spread of a homogeneous written standard variety of Dutch, symbolising 'the' nation. In concrete terms, these top-down endeavours resulted in the first official codification of the Dutch orthography (Siegenbeek 1804) and grammar (Weiland 1805). Despite marking a decisive turning point in the standardisation history of Dutch, the effectiveness of the so-called schrijftaalregeling 'written language regulation' has never been investigated empirically.Taking a historical-sociolinguistic approach, this dissertation aims to fill this research gap by examining the impact of language policy on patterns of variation and change. How successful was the schrijftaalregeling in disseminating the officialised norms across the population at large, as envisaged by the government? Making use of the newly compiled Going Dutch Corpus, a diachronic multi-genre corpus comprising more than 420,000 words of authentic usage data (private letters, diaries and travelogues, newspapers), a wide range of orthographic and morphosyntactic features is analysed. Show less
The Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the... Show moreThe Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the stressed diphthongs [jE] and [wO] and the unstressed monophthongs [e] and [o], respectively, within a limited group of inflectional and derivational paradigms. Historically, the monophthong–diphthong alternation was the consequence of a pan-Romance diphthongization process that affected the Late Latin low mid vowels in stressed positions. The relatively recent levelling of this alternation has led to a great deal of variation: in some cases the alternations are maintained while in others they have been eliminated. The first aim of the present study was to scrutinize durational aspects of Italian diphthongs and monophthongs in general. The second aim was to examine to what extent the variation caused by analogical levelling of the monophthong–diphthong alternation, attested in written sources, also occurs in the spoken language. To investigate these issues, a series of production experiments was carried out with native speakers of Italian. The final aim was to provide a coherent phonological treatment of the insights provided by the experiments within the framework of Optimality Theory.The book is intended as a contribution to experimental phonetics and phonology. It introduces an exciting tool for language-variation research, the speech-shadowing technique, and discusses recent phonological approaches to phenomena such as glide formation, analogy and paradigm uniformity. Therefore, this study is of interest to both phoneticians and phonologists, as well as to linguists with a special interest in Italian. Show less
