Dutch prescriptive grammar rules dictate that the complementizer dan ‘than’ should be used in comparative constructions of inequality. This has been an issue for grammarians from the sixteenth century onwards when als ‘as’ started to be used as an alternative form in this type of context. In order to find out why and when people choose one comparative marker over the other, we examined the use of these markers in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). We found that the use of dan is overall more common than als in comparative constructions of inequality, even though from a linguistic point of view als might be favoured. The choice between als and dan turns out to be strongly correlated with the level of education. Although this factor has been assumed to be of influence for a long time, as far as we know it has never been quantitatively tested before. We conclude that the effect of the level of education we found reflects the strong influence of the prescriptive rule taught in schools, repressing the use of als in comparatives of inequality.
2024. The Differential Object Marker in Valencian: Another Failure of Prescriptivism. Languages 9:3 ► pp. 101 ff.
Schoenmakers, Gert-Jan
2023. Linguistic judgments in 3D: the aesthetic quality, linguistic acceptability, and surface probability of stigmatized and non-stigmatized variation. Linguistics 61:3 ► pp. 779 ff.
Sert, Cansel, Ferdy Hubers, Theresa Redl & Helen de Hoop
2021. Long-term written language experience affects grammaticality judgements and usage but not priming of spoken sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 74:8 ► pp. 1378 ff.
Hubers, Ferdy, Theresa Redl, Hugo de Vos, Lukas Reinarz & Helen de Hoop
2020. Processing Prescriptively Incorrect Comparative Particles: Evidence From Sentence-Matching and Eye-Tracking. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Hubers, Ferdy, Thijs Trompenaars, Sebastian Collin, Kees De Schepper & Helen De Hoop
2020. Hypercorrection as a By-product of Education. Applied Linguistics 41:4 ► pp. 552 ff.
2016. How the brain processes violations of the grammatical norm: An fMRI study. Brain and Language 163 ► pp. 22 ff.
Reinarz, Lukas, Hugo de Vos & Helen de Hoop
2016. Conflicting Constraints in the Comparative Cycle. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 28:4 ► pp. 403 ff.
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