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In:Free Variation in Grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches
Edited by Kristin Kopf and Thilo Weber
[Studies in Language Companion Series 234] 2023
► pp. 229–257

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Chapter 8
Resemanticising ‘free’ variation

The case of V1 conditionals in Dutch

ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 31 October 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234.08nij
Abstract
Whether or not languages display ‘free’ variation is a moot point. In this article, we look at a near-synonymous pair in syntax, namely, V1 vs syndetic conditionals in Dutch, and argue that due to diachronic developments, Dutch has been in a situation for quite some time in which these two variants coexist. Despite this coexistence, a state in which they alternate freely is unstable: syntactic/semantic investigation shows that V1 is retreating into a specialised niche of tentativeness and counterfactuality, though the development has not advanced as far as in English, where a similar development can be witnessed. We show the subtle differences between the two types of conditionals with traditional logistic regression as well as with semantic vectors and multidimensional scaling.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Development of the V1 conditional in West Germanic
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Coding and behaviour properties of conditional clauses
    • 3.2Corpus
    • 3.3Operationalisation
    • 3.4Model building
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Semantic and syntactic effects
    • 4.2Lexical effects
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (82)
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