Chapter 3
The alternation between standard and vernacular pronouns by
Belgian Dutch parents in child-oriented control acts
This paper studies the social meaning of standard
and vernacular pronouns of address in Dutch by zooming in on the
position they hold in parents’ control acts to their children.
Linking the hyperstandardized linguistic situation in Flanders with
the Western-European ideal of democratic parenting, we expect to
find that the standard forms are more typically connected to more
indirect, softer control acts. This hypothesis is tested through a
mixed method approach, where quantitative and qualitative analyses
are used to chart the choices of ten Belgian Dutch parents when
issuing directives to their children. Studying 452 pronouns we
identify a clear link between the choice of variety and parameters
such as type of control act, repetition, mitigation and boosting and
type of pronoun, with ‘irritation’ as mediating factor.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Control acts
- 1.2Standard-vernacular variation in control acts
- 1.3The Dutch language laboratory
- 2.Data and variables
- 2.1Self-recordings
- 2.2Response variable: Pronouns of address in control acts
- 2.3Predictor variables
- 3.Analyses and results
- 3.1Results of the quantitative analyses
- 3.2Results of the qualitative analyses
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References
Antaki, Charles
2002 An
Introductory Tutorial in Conversation
Analysis. Available online
at:
[URL]
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1990 “
You
don’t touch lettuce with your fingers: Parental politeness
in family discourse.”
Journal
of
Pragmatics 14 (2): 259–288.


Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1997 Dinner
Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in
Family Discourse. Mahwah, New Jerset: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen
C. Levinson
1987 Politeness,
Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.


Brumark, Åsa
2006a “
Non-observance
of Gricean maxims in family dinner table
conversation”.
Journal of
Pragmatics 38: 1206–1238.


Brumark, Åsa
2010 “
Behaviour
regulation at the family dinner table. The use of and
response to direct and indirect behaviour regulation in ten
Swedish families”.
Journal of
Child
Language 37: 1065–1088.


Buttny, Richard
2001 “
Therapeutic
humor in retelling the clients’
tellings”.
Text 21 (3): 303–327.


Chevrot, Jean-Pierre, Laurence Beaud, and Renata Varga
2000 “
Developmental
data on a French sociolinguistic variable: Post-consonantal
word-final /R/”.
Language
Variation and
Change 12: 295–319.


Craven, Alexandra, and Jonathan Potter
2010 “
Directives:
Entitlement and contingency in
action”.
Discourse
Studies 12(4): 419–442.


Clift, Rebecca
2016 “
Agency
and autonomy in
indirection”. Paper
presented
at
Sociolinguistics
Symposium
21, Murcia,
Spain.
Curl, Traci
S., and Paul Drew
2008 “
Contingency
and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of
Requesting.”
Research on
Language and Social
Interaction 41(2): 129–153.


Debrabandere, Frans
2005 “
Het
echec van de ABN-actie in
Vlaanderen”.
Nederlands van
nu 53 (1): 27–31.

De
Houwer, Annick
2003 “
Language
variation and local elements in family
discourse”.
Language
Variation and
Change 15: 329–349.


De
Vogelaer, Gunther
2008 De
Nederlandse en Friese subjectsmarkeerders: geografie,
typologie en
diachronie. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde.

De Vogelaer, G., & Toye, J.
(
2017)
Acquiring attitudes towards varieties of Dutch: A quantitative perspective. In
G. De Vogelaer &
M. Katerbow (Eds.),
Acquiring sociolinguistic variation (pp. 117–154). John Benjamins.

Ervin-Tripp, Susan
1976 “
Is
Sybil There? The Structure of Some American English
Directives.”
Language in
Society 5 (1): 25–66.


Foulkes, Paul, Gerard Docherty, and Dominic Watt
2005 “
Phonological
variation in child-directed
speech”.
Language 81 (1): 177–206.


Geeraerts, Dirk, and Hans
Van
de Velde
2013 Supra-regional
characteristics of colloquial
Dutch. In
Language
and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic
Variation, ed.
By
Frans Hinskens, and
Johan Taeldeman. Volume 3: Dutch. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Ghyselen, Anne-Sophie
2015 “
‘Stabilisering’
van tussentaal?”
Taal &
Tongval 67 (1): 43–95.


Ghyselen, Anne-Sophie, and Gunther
De Vogelaer
2013 “
The
impact of dialect loss on the acceptance of tussentaal: the
special case of West-Flanders in
Belgium”. In
Language
(de)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: experimental
studies, edited
by
Torre Kristiansen, and
Stefan Grondelaers, 153–170. Oslo: Novus.

Goodwin, Marjorie
Harness
2006 “
Participation,
affect, and trajectory in family directive/response
sequences”.
Text & Talk –
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse
Communication
Studies 26: 515–543.


Goodwin, Marjorie
Harness, and Asta Cekaite
2013 “
Calibration
in directive/response sequences in family
interaction.”
Journal of
Pragmatics 46 (1): 122–138.


Grondelaers, Stefan, and Roeland
Van Hout
2011 “
The
standard language situation in the Low Countries: Top-down
and bottom-up variations on a diaglossic
theme”.
Journal of Germanic
Linguistics 23 (3): 199–243.


Grondelaers, Stefan, and Roeland
Van Hout
2016 “
Destandardization
is not
destandardization”.
Taal
&
Tongval 68 (2): 119–149.


Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine
2011 Leadership,
Discourse and
Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Jaspers, Jürgen, and Sarah
Van Hoof
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew
E. Danielson
2006 “
Mobility,
indexicality, and the enregisterment of
‘Pittsburghese’.”
Journal of
English
Linguistics 32 (4): 77–104.


Kent, Alexandra
2012 “
Compliance,
resistance and incipient compliance when responding to
directives.”
Discourse
Studies 14 (6): 711–730.


Lybaert, Chloé
2014 “
Perceptie
van tussentaal in het gesproken Nederlands in Vlaanderen.
Een experimentele benadering van
saillantie”.
Nederlandse
Taalkunde 19 (2): 185–219.


MacWhinney, Brian
2000 The
CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing
Talk. Mahwah (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mondada, Lorenza
2011 “
Understanding
as an embodied, situated and sequential achievement in
interaction”.
Journal of
Pragmatics 43: 542–552.


Mondada, Lorenza
2016 Conventions
for multimodal
transcription. Available online
at:
[URL]
Ochs, Elinor, and Schieffelin, Bambi
B.
1984 “
Language
acquisition and socialization: Three developmental
stories.” In
Culture
theory: Mind, self, and
emotion, edited
by
Richard Shweder and
Robert LeVine, 276–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ochs, Elinor and Shohet, Merav
2006 “
The
Cultural Structuring of Mealtime
Socialization.”
New
Directions for Child and Adolescent
Development 111: 35–49.


Pećnik, Nina
2007 “
Towards
a vision of parenting in the best interest of the
child”. In
Parenting
in Contemporary Europe: a Positive
Approach, edited
by
Mary Daly, 15–36. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publications.

Plevoets, Koen
2008 Tussen
spreek- en standaardtaal. Een corpusgebaseerd onderzoek naar
de situationele, regionale en sociale verspreiding van
enkele morfosyntactische verschijnselen uit het gesproken
Belgisch-Nederlands. University of Leuven dissertation.

Preston, Dennis
2013 “
The
influence of regard on language variation and
change”.
Journal of
Pragmatics 52: 93–104.


R Core
Team
2017 R: A
language and environment for statistical
computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL
[URL]
Rossi, Giovanni, and Jorg Zinken
2016 “
Grammar
and social agency: the pragmatics of impersonal deontic
statements.”
Language 92 (4): e296–e325.


Samara, Anna, Kenny Smith, Helen Brown, and Elizabeth Wonnacott
2017 Acquiring
variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are
sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic
variation.
Cognitive
Psychology 94: 85–114.


Schaffer, H.
Rudolph
1996 Social
Development. Oxford: Blackwell.

Schieffelin, Bambi
B., and Elinor Ochs
1986 “
Language
socialization.”
Annual Review
of
Anthropology 15: 163–191.


Searle, John
1969 Speech
Acts. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.


Schneidman, Laura, and Amanda
L. Woodward
2015 “
Are
child-directed interactions the cradle of social
learning?”
Psychological
Bulletin 142 (1): 1–17.


Stevanovic, Melisa, and Anssi Peräkylä
2012 “
Deontic
authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose,
and decide”.
Research on
Language and Social
Interaction 45 (3): 297–321.


Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Jason Grafmiller, Benedikt Heller, and Melanie Röthlisberger
Tagliamonte, Sali, and Harald Baayen
2012 “
Models,
forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a
case study for statistical
practice”.
Language Variation
and
Change 24: 135–178.


Vandekerckhove, Reinhild
2004 “
Waar
zijn je, jij en jou(w) gebleven? Pronominale aanspreekvorm
in het gesproken Nederlands van
Vlamingen”. In
Taeldeman,
man van de taal, schatbewaarder van de
taal, edited
by
Johan
De Caluwe,
Georges
De Schutter,
Magda Devos, and
Jacques
Van Keymeulen, 981–995. Gent: Academia Press.

Van De
Mieroop, Dorien, Eline Zenner, and Stefania Marzo
2016 “
Standard
and Colloquial Belgian Dutch pronouns of address: A
variationist-interactional study of child-directed speech in
dinner table
interactions”.
Folia
Linguistica 50 (1): 31–64.


Zenner, Eline, Dirk Geeraerts, and Dirk Speelman
2009 “
Expeditie
Tussentaal: leeftijd, identiteit en context in ‘Expeditie
Robinson’”.
Nederlandse
Taalkunde 14: 26–44.


Zenner, Eline, Gitte Kristiansen, and Dirk Geeraerts
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Kristiansen, Gitte, Eline Zenner & Dirk Geeraerts
Naborn, Lars, Dorien Van De Mieroop & Eline Zenner
2023.
Emotion in multivarietal family language policy in Flanders.
International Journal of Bilingualism 27:2
► pp. 181 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.