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Free Variation in Grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches
Edited by Kristin Kopf and Thilo Weber
[Studies in Language Companion Series 234] 2023
► pp. 229–257

Chapter 8
Resemanticising ‘free’ variation

The case of V1 conditionals in Dutch

ORCID logo | KU Leuven
ORCID logo | KU Leuven

Whether or not languages display ‘free’ variation is a moot point. In this article, we look at a near-synonymous pair in syntax, namely, V1 vs syndetic conditionals in Dutch, and argue that due to diachronic developments, Dutch has been in a situation for quite some time in which these two variants coexist. Despite this coexistence, a state in which they alternate freely is unstable: syntactic/semantic investigation shows that V1 is retreating into a specialised niche of tentativeness and counterfactuality, though the development has not advanced as far as in English, where a similar development can be witnessed. We show the subtle differences between the two types of conditionals with traditional logistic regression as well as with semantic vectors and multidimensional scaling.

Keywords: conditionals, V1 clauses, semantic vectors, logistic regression, multidimensional scaling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Development of the V1 conditional in West Germanic
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Coding and behaviour properties of conditional clauses
    • 3.2Corpus
    • 3.3Operationalisation
    • 3.4Model building
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Semantic and syntactic effects
    • 4.2Lexical effects
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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: 31 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234.08nij
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