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Article published In:
Methods for Studying Variation in Partitives
Edited by Petra Sleeman and Anne Tamm
[Linguistic Variation 24:2] 2024
► pp. 262–296

Variation in the use of the partitive pronoun ER in regional (Heerlen) standard Dutch

 | NL-Lab (KNAW)
ORCID logo | University of Amsterdam
This paper focuses on the variable use of partitive er in two types of constructions. First, er combined with cardinal numbers like drie ‘three’ and quantifiers like genoeg ‘enough’. Second, er combined with an elliptical noun referring to age and weight. Er should be present in the first case (Ik heb *(er) drie ‘I have three’) but absent in the second case (Hij is (*er) tachtig ‘He is eighty’), according to normative Dutch grammars.
The spontaneous spoken speech of 67 speakers born and raised in Heerlen, in the southeast of the Netherlands was analyzed, investigating the use of er also according to social distribution: language background, education/occupation and age.
The results show that er is used variably in the two types of constructions. It was found that younger speakers differ in some contexts from older speakers, suggesting that language change is going on, possibly under the influence of standard Dutch.
Keywords: partitive pronoun, quantifier, age, social distribution, Heerlen Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The emergence of Heerlen Dutch
  • 3.Research questions, hypotheses, and methodology
    • 3.1Research questions and hypotheses
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Data
    • 3.4Searching the corpus
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The quantificational construction
    • 4.2The age/weight construction
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The quantificational construction
    • 5.2The age/weight construction
    • 5.3Linguistic analysis
      • 5.3.1The quantificational construction
      • 5.3.2The age/weight construction
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 22 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23026.cor
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Sleeman, Petra
2024. The Partitive Pronoun ER in Two National Varieties of Standard Dutch . In Partitive Constructions and Partitive Elements Within and Across Language Borders in Europe , DOI logo
Tamm, Anne
2024. Methodological solutions for researching the variation of partitives in languages with rich nominal morphology. Linguistic Variation DOI logo

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