Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019
Edited by Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 36] 2019
► pp. 115–129
Part II: Selected papers presented at the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day
of 2019
Changes in argument structure
The case of Dutch vernieuwen
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 5 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00027.dre
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00027.dre
Abstract
English is often contrasted with German and Dutch when it comes
to the semantic roles that the subject can express (Hawkins, John A. 1986. A Comparative Typology of English and German. London: Croom Helm.; Los, Bettelou & Gea Dreschler. 2012. “The loss of local anchoring: From adverbial local anchors to
permissive subjects.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of English ed. by T. Nevalainen & E. Traugott, 859–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Specifically, English seems to have more
middles (She photographs well) and allows for unusual inanimate
subjects (The cottage sleeps four). However, it seems that the
semantics of the grammatical subject in Dutch are also changing, as witnessed by
recent examples from websites and advertisements, such as Uw
fietsenstalling verbetert and Presikhaaf
vernieuwt. Although these sentences do not have the adverb that is
typical of middles in Dutch (Broekhuis, Hans, Norbert Corver & Riet Vos. 2015. Syntax of Dutch: Verb and Verb Phrases, Volume 11. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. : 455ff.), they meet several other requirements
for middle formation. In this paper, I analyse examples with one such verb,
vernieuwen, and identify two different types of
intransitive uses for this predominantly transitive verb. I argue that
ambiguity, analogy and genre all play an important role in this change in
argument structure.
Keywords: middles, semantic roles, subject, analogy, syntactic change
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background: Transitivity alternations and middles in Dutch
- 3.Vernieuwen: Transitive, intransitive and middle
- 3.1A note on data and methodology
- 3.2Current transitive and intransitive uses of vernieuwen
- 3.3Is this really a new development?
- 4.Vernieuwen as a middle: Explaining an ongoing
development
- 4.1Genre
- 4.2Ambiguity, vagueness and analogy
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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