Investigating change from a perspective of continuity
Dutch two-verb clusters in sixteenth-century Antwerp
Word order variation in Dutch two-verb clusters continues to attract the attention of linguists from a
variety of perspectives. Most accounts have a contemporary focus and diachronic developments therefore remain poorly
understood. Rather than simply marshalling more evidence from more historical sources, I argue for an approach which
considers biases in the historical record and how common methodological practices of text selection and data
aggregation exacerbate them. Van Coetsem’s (1988; 2000) psycholinguistic model of contact offers a principled way to establish whether the
linguistic data represents a perspective of continuity or one of change. When combined with a rigorous understanding
of the sociohistorical context, the biases in both the historical and linguistic record can be assessed and this
understanding applied to the compilation and analysis of new sources of evidence. I demonstrate the utility of this
approach using a 35,000-word research corpus of unpublished archival manuscripts from sixteenth-century Antwerp to
examine word order variation in Dutch two-verb clusters and use these findings to suggest directions for future
corpus-based research.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Diachronic accounts of two-verb clusters in Dutch
- 3.Local language use and assumptions of sociohistorical and sociolinguistic stability
- 4.Contact: A disruptor of continuity and facilitator of change
- 5.Motivating perspectives of continuity and change: The sociohistorical context
- 6.Investigating change from a perspective of continuity
- 7.Conclusion
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Manuscript sources
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References
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Appendix