Dutch conditional sentences can occur in canonical clause order, such that the antecedent precedes the consequent, but also in non-canonical order, with the antecedent in sentence-final position. One explanation for the existence of this variety lies in the implicatures they convey: predictive… read more
Slurs are pejorative terms for groups of people, relating to for example their nationality, their sexual orientation, etc. While there is a lot of discussion about slurs, they are typically characterized in relation to a neutral noun. In this article we will explore this distinction between… read more
In this paper, we investigate whether non-native speakers of Dutch use the interpersonal discourse particle eigenlijk differently than native speakers of Dutch. Particles such as eigenlijk are considered to be very difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Eigenlijk might be even more… read more
Children acquire the meaning of ook ‘also’ in Dutch relatively late (Bergsma 2006), although this focus particle is highly frequent. We argue that this late acquisition is caused by a pragmatic rule: contrastive implicature. We follow Sæbø (2004), who argues that additives are used because… read more
Many experiments on several languages have shown that children tend to interpret indefinite objects nonreferentially, while they tend to interpret indefinite subjects referentially. This is in accordance with Comrie’s (1989) generalization that subjects of transitive clauses are usually highly… read more