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Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 157–186

Relativisation in Dutch diaries, private letters and newspapers (1770–1840)

A genre-specific national language?

| Leiden University
| Leiden University

The paper focuses on three important themes in historical sociolinguistics: (1) the emergence of national language planning in the Netherlands around 1800, (2) the influence of historical prescriptivism on usage, and (3) genre as a crucial factor in explaining variation and change. The case study deals with relativisation, particularly the neuter relative pronoun in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch. Analysing both internal and external factors, we show that the definiteness of the antecedent does not explain the variation, contrary to what is assumed in the research literature. Likewise, a strong effect of language norms on usage patterns cannot be established. The crucial factor turns out to be genre.

Keywords: relativisation, relative clause, Dutch, Germanic, historical sociolinguistics, nationalism, language planning, genre variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical-sociolinguistic background
  • 3.The variable
    • 3.1Changes in relativisation
    • 3.2Focusing on Dutch relative pronouns
    • 3.3The neuter relative pronoun in Late Modern Dutch
    • 3.4Norms for relativisation in Late Modern Dutch
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Diachronic overview
    • 5.2Definiteness of the antecedent
    • 5.3Geographical variation
    • 5.4Gender variation
    • 5.5Zooming in on genre
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.07kro
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