In spoken language, major prosodic boundaries can be marked by three types of prosodic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Although these cues appear cross-linguistically, their relative weight in signaling boundaries is considered language-specific. However, very little is known about prosodic phrasing in the production of Dutch. Past studies on Dutch prosodic phrasing mostly focused on boundary perception, suggesting that pause is the most important cue in Dutch. The present study examined the use of boundary cues in the production of Dutch utterance-medial intonational phrase (IP) boundaries. We investigated these boundaries in two syntactically different contexts: coordinated name sequences and compound sentences. In both contexts, the IP boundary reflects the syntactic structure of the utterance. In the name sequences, the boundary serves as the only means to disambiguate a global syntactic ambiguity, while in the compound sentences it aligns with a clause ending. Sixteen native Dutch speakers produced the target utterances with or without an IP boundary. We measured pitch height, IP-final and pre-IP-final syllable durations, and pause duration at the boundary. All three types of cues were used to mark IP boundaries, but speakers used the pause cue to a larger extent in the name sequences than in the compound sentences. Additionally, we found that final lengthening was the most consistently used IP boundary-marking cue. Our results thus challenge the notion of pause as the most dominant cue in Dutch. They suggest that pre-boundary lengthening may be the most consistently used cue, at least, from a production perspective.

Research has shown that the mental representations evoked by Dutch masculine pronouns, even when intended as generic, can be male-biased (Redl, 2021). Such bias can perpetuate gender inequalities in society (e.g., Stout & Dasgupta, 2011), prompting language users to seek more inclusive alternatives, such as gender-neutral pronouns. This study investigates the effect of Dutch gender-neutral pronouns as generic referential strategies on perceived text quality, and maps familiarity with and attitudes toward Dutch gender-neutral pronouns. The first experiment was conducted among a representative sample of Belgian participants, while the second experiment involved a mixed sample of Belgian and Dutch participants, thus facilitating a comparison between the two varieties of Dutch. The results show that gender-neutral pronouns do not affect text comprehensibility. However, the pronoun combination die-die-diens (subject-object-possessive) may impair text appreciation, even among young, highly educated participants familiar with gender-neutral pronouns. This study documents increasing familiarity with gender-neutral pronouns in Flanders and is the first to map familiarity in the Netherlands. Taking into account attitude measures, hen in subject position has little potential to be accepted, but the combination die-hen-hun does show potential. Additionally, our study suggests that plural forms are a viable gender-inclusive referential strategy for those who seek to avoid masculine generics.

The doubling of auxiliaries ‘have’ and ‘be’ in perfect tense constructions is a European areal phenomenon. It is present in languages of different filiations that have been in contact for a long time. In Dutch its distribution is largely restricted to the southeastern part of Dutch-speaking Belgium and some communities of North Brabant in the Netherlands. Double perfects are attested in contemporary Afrikaans, which is contrary to what we should expect, given that its metropolitan dialectal base is Hollandic, not southern Netherlandic. The Cape Dutch and Afrikaans evidence, sparse as it is, suggests that the range of this feature was significantly broader in vernacular Early Modern Dutch than one might infer from contemporary metropolitan norms.*

This article examines Afrikaans V1-constructions with the verb laat ‘let’ and compares them with similar constructions in Dutch. I refer to these as pseudo-let imperatives (or PLI-constructions). Although PLI-constructions have the same form as some let-imperatives in both languages, they no longer function as commands and lack the directive force typically associated with imperatives. Instead, PLI-constructions are used to express the speaker’s perspective on a certain event or action. Drawing on grammaticalization criteria used by Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2015, 2017) in their work on perception and causative verbs in imperative(-like) constructions in Dutch, this article argues that PLI-laat/laten has undergone grammaticalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch. Additionally, I demonstrate that the Afrikaans PLI-laat has grammaticalized further than its Dutch counterpart. I propose that Afrikaans’ contact with a variety of other languages throughout its history may have accelerated the grammaticalization of laat relative to its Dutch counterpart, resulting in the observed differences in the grammaticalization of PLI-laat/laten constructions.

This article concerns the so-called Infinitivus Pro Participio (IPP) effect – in terms of which what appears to be an infinitive surfaces where a selected past participle is expected – as it manifests in modern Afrikaans. Prior research has highlighted the apparent optionality of this effect, leading to conflicting conclusions regarding the continued existence of a productive IPP-effect in contemporary Afrikaans. Here we draw on recent corpus- and questionnaire-based investigations to consider the optionality of the IPP-effect in Afrikaans in more empirical detail, with the objective of establishing (i) the status of the IPP in Afrikaans and (ii) how it differs from the IPP in Dutch. The article’s second objective is to consider the role of language contact in shaping the IPP-effect as it is currently attested in (varieties of) Afrikaans.*

This article discusses pronominal gender agreement in Dutch. Based on a sentence completion task filled out by about 10,000 speakers, we provide evidence for the claim that there is an ongoing shift from lexical to semantic agreement in Dutch, even in a formal register. Results of correspondence and cluster analyses indicate that nouns with the same degree of individuation group together. Furthermore, the analyses reveal an age effect, with three distinct speaker groups that follow a specific gender agreement pattern. Younger speakers are more semantically oriented than older speakers, who are more lexically oriented, which points to apparent-time language change.

The current research aims to predict L1 Papiamento and L2 Dutch reading comprehension development in 180 children in the upper primary grades (4–6) in a post-colonial Caribbean context from initial language of decoding instruction, cognitive and linguistic child characteristics, and linguistic transfer. Overall, children showed better reading comprehension proficiency in L1 as compared to L2 Dutch. Over the grades, strong autoregression effects in reading comprehension development in both languages were evidenced. Language of decoding instruction was found to predict L2 reading comprehension, but not L1 reading comprehension. The development of L2 reading comprehension showed better outcomes in the case of initial decoding instruction in L2. Word decoding, reading vocabulary, and grammar in respectively L1 and L2 were related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension in Grade 4, while L2 reading comprehension was additionally related to L2 basic oral vocabulary. Moreover, only reading vocabulary was related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension development across the grades. Finally, evidence of cross-linguistic interdependencies in the development of reading comprehension in L1 and L2 was found.

Over the past decades, bilingualism researchers have come to a consensus around a fairly strong view of nonselectivity in bilingual speakers, often citing Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) as a critical piece of support for this position. Given the study’s continuing relevance to bilingualism and its strong test of the influence of a bilingual’s second language on their first language, we conducted an approximate replication of the lexical decision experiments in the original study (Experiments 2 and 3) using the same tasks and—to the extent possible—the same stimuli. Unlike the original study, our replication was conducted online with Dutch–English bilinguals (rather than in a lab with Dutch–English–French trilinguals). Despite these differences, results overall closely replicated the pattern of cognate facilitation effects observed in the original study. We discuss the replication of outcomes and possible interpretations of subtle differences in outcomes and make recommendations for future extensions of this line of research.

Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten ‘put’ pst-pl with zetten ‘put’ prs-pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet ‘have put’). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change.

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*