3 - Perspectives on Dutch syntax

Summary

The Dutch grammatical tradition has been deeply influenced by the German nineteenth-century ‘logical analysis’ (Becker 1827), itself a descendant of the seventeenth-century French grammaire raisonnée (Arnauld et Lancelot 1667), which was felt to provide a more suitable framework for language teaching than the classical grammatical tradition handed down from the Middle Ages. In the logical analysis, the object of inquiry is the proposition as an expression of thought; syntax is the study of the way parts of speech combine to form a proposition.

In the Netherlands, the logical analysis was introduced in Roorda (1852), and its application to school grammar found a culmination point in Den Hertog (1892–1896). Den Hertog ([1892] 1972, vol. 1: 8–11) presents his work as eclectic, including elements from what he calls the ‘morphological’ approach as well, and emphasizes the need to consider form and meaning in tandem. This has since been a recurrent theme in Dutch twentieth-century approaches to syntax, with proper attention to both form and meaning constituting a kind of shibboleth of the right linguistic persuasion (especially in European-structuralist and functionalist circles).