Freek Van De Velde
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 821584 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Freek Van De Velde |
| NOMBRES | Freek |
| APELLIDO | Van De Velde |
| FIRMA | VAN DE VELDE F |
| AFILIACIONES | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3050-2207 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2007 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Spread the German new(s)
With the introduction of a new reflexive in the Early Modern period (‘ zich ’), Dutch witnessed a remarkable shift in its pronominal system. While it has long been recognised that this shift betrays an eastern influence from its continental West-Germanic neighbour, High German, the spatio-temporal vector of this change remains elusive. It has been hypothesised that the major impetus came from either Protestant writings contributing to the Reforma…
Testing the performance of S-curves for language change
This article investigates the effectiveness of sigmoid trajectories (S-curves) for statistically modelling language change. In diachronic linguistics, it is customary to fit a sigmoid regression line through data, on the assumption that such a curve fits the ideal language change. A coefficient with an associated p-value significantly different from zero is taken as evidence for the presence of a change. Here, we take the inverse perspective: giv…
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
Construction Grammar is one of the fastest-growing branches of functional syntax. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this handbook provides a complete overview of the current issues and applications in this approach. Divided into six thematic parts, it covers the fundamental notions of Construction Grammar, its conceptual origins and the basic ideas that unite its various branches, its solid empirical grounding and affinities wi…
Een multivariate analyse van de diachronie van het ge-prefix bij het voltooid deelwoord van perfectiva simplicia in het Middelnederlands
Middle Dutch sports a number of verbs whose past participle occurs without the characteristic ge-prefix, because of their inherently perfective aspect: bliven (‘stay’), brengen (‘bring’), comen (‘come’), liden (‘(under)go’), vinden (‘find’) and werden (‘become’). This article presents a multivariate analysis of a corpus study on 2683 tokens of these Middle Dutch participles. It confirms earlier hypotheses on the Hollandic origin of the ge- ausgle…
Introduction
The research paradigm of alternation studies is forming an increasingly large share of the empirical foundations of usage-based linguistics. As the paradigm is essentially an amalgamation of research traditions from various subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and construction grammar, it sports various definitions of the concept of “alternation” and various ways of conducting an alternat…
Diachrony and Diachronica
In this second set of contributions on the 40th anniversary of Diachronica, seven historical linguists provide perspectives on the current state of the field and aims for the future. While the authors in issue 40.4 focused on the ideas that have structured the field – the actuation problem, the relationship between synchrony and diachrony, and how we do our work – this current set of contributions focus on method: what we do, how and why we do it…
Men use more complex language than women, but the difference has decreased over time
Differences in language use between men and women have been studied intensely. We take stock of the findings and venture into less charted territory. First, we broaden the scope from well-known lexical features to the domain of syntax. Second, we take a diachronic perspective, looking at changes between 1880 and 1999. Based on a corpus of written Dutch by prolific writers, we find statistically robust differences: men's style can be characterized…
Reassembling the Pimped Ride
Over the past decades, research on the linguistic impact of globalization has foregrounded the socio-pragmatic meaning potential and mental categorization of anglicisms, looking for signs of agentivity and contextual sensitivity in the way receptor language users incorporate borrowed English resources into their speech, both in form and in function. This brought attention to understudied phenotypes of contact-induced variation and change that go …
Years of written Dutch
In this article, we present a new corpus spanning 163 years of written Dutch. This Dutch Corpus of Contemporary and late Modern Periodicals (Dutch C-CLAMP) comprises 47,738 part-of-speech tagged articles published in Dutch periodicals from 1837 until 1999, totaling approximately 200 million tokens in size. We explain the measures we took to overcome the shortcomings of existing corpora of historical Dutch covering the same period. We provide a de…
Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing
Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced consid…
De wervelkolom van taalverandering
The spine of language change In his contribution to the 2005 anniversary issue of the journal Nederlandse Taalkunde, Fred Weerman remarked on the famous S-curve underlying language change, and claimed that a good explanation for this pattern is still lacking. We pick up the thread and assess what 15 years of research have clarified about the nature of the curve. We look at two aspects: the onset of the curve (also known as the ‘actuation problem’…
A diachronic study of indirect object doubling in Argentinian Spanish
This article investigates the textual motivation of clitic doubling in Spanish with a case study of indirect object doubling in 18th, 19th and 20th century Argentinian Spanish. It is generally assumed that doubling originated with preposed and stressed NPs, and increased in frequency till it was obligatory in those contexts. This development and the further spread of doubling have been ascribed mainly to topicality and high accessibility of the i…
On cause and correlation in language change
Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We present a statistical method that can help to assess whether two historical changes are not only cor…
A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch
Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ran…
Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch
Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e.g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection ( spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronicall…
Beyond Mere Text Frequency
Grammaticalization has proven to be an insightful approach to semantic-morphosyntactic change within and across languages. Many studies, however, rely on assessing the large, obvious differences before and after the change. When investigating burgeoning or ongoing grammaticalization processes, it is notably harder to objectively measure the degree of grammaticalization. One approach is to gauge changes in the well-known 'parameters' of Lehmann, H…
Reassessing the evolution of West Germanic preterite inflection
This article takes a quantitative approach to the long-term dynamics of the preterite inflection in West Germanic, with a special focus on Dutch. In a first step, we replicate two often-cited studies on English and German ( Lieberman et al. 2007 and Carroll et al. 2012 , respectively) by looking at Dutch. This part also tackles some methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. In a second step, we delve deeper into the evolution of the pr…
Wayward categorial shift
Constructional contamination in morphology and syntax
In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced in Pijpops & Van de Velde (2016) . …
Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change
The real-time dynamics of the individual and the community in grammaticalization
Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propos…
Exaptation and Language Change
This volume is the first collection of papers that is exclusively dedicated to the concept of exaptation, a notion from evolutionary biology that was famously introduced into linguistics by Roger Lass in 1990. The past quarter-century has seen a heated debate on the properties of linguistic exaptation, its demarcation from other processes of linguistic change, and indeed the question of whether it is a useful concept in historical linguistics at …
The discourse motivation for split-ergative alignment in Dutch nominalisations (and elsewhere)
Dutch nominalisations of the type het eten van vlees (‘the eating of meat’) have ergative alignment. The alignment is functionally motivated, in that it is a natural consequence of the flow of discourse. The functional account that is put forward here draws on the notion of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987) and on the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded discourse (Hopper & Thompson 1980). Support for this account comes fro…
Patroon en argument
Over patronen in taal en visies met verrassende argumenten in de Nederlandse taalkunde Naar aanleiding van het emeritaat van de Leuvense hoogleraren William Van Belle en Joop van der Horst hebben niet minder dan 80 collega’s uit binnen- en buitenland samen 53 artikelen geschreven over een breed scala van thema’s in de Nederlandse en algemene [...]
Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse
Recent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersona…
The real-time dynamics of the individual and the community in grammaticalization
Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propos…
(Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch
A corpus-based account of the development of English such and Dutch zulk
On the basis of synchronic English language material, Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972) has put forward the hypothesis that intensifying meanings or “degree words” often develop from identifying expressions. This paper will empirically test Bolinger's hypothesis by means of in-depth diachronic study of the development of such —one of Bolinger's central examples—and of its Dutch cognate zulk in historical text corpora. To this aim, a detailed …
Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing
Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced consid…
Homoplasy in diachronic grammar
The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP
This article inquires into the diachrony of the determiner in Dutch. First, it is argued that the determiner is an emergent syntactic category, and that it must be consequently excluded from universal grammar. Second, it is argued that languages that do have a determiner slot in the NP differ considerably with regard to which lexemes they allow in this function. On the basis of these two observations, an in depth usage-based analysis of the emerg…
Men use more complex language than women, but the difference has decreased over time
Differences in language use between men and women have been studied intensely. We take stock of the findings and venture into less charted territory. First, we broaden the scope from well-known lexical features to the domain of syntax. Second, we take a diachronic perspective, looking at changes between 1880 and 1999. Based on a corpus of written Dutch by prolific writers, we find statistically robust differences: men's style can be characterized…
Beyond Mere Text Frequency
Grammaticalization has proven to be an insightful approach to semantic-morphosyntactic change within and across languages. Many studies, however, rely on assessing the large, obvious differences before and after the change. When investigating burgeoning or ongoing grammaticalization processes, it is notably harder to objectively measure the degree of grammaticalization. One approach is to gauge changes in the well-known 'parameters' of Lehmann, H…
PP extraction and extraposition in Functional Discourse Grammar
A structural-functional account of NP-internal mood
Does framing work? An empirical study of Simplifying Models for sustainable food production
We investigate empirically whether framing in general, and the use of Simplifying Models as a framing tool in particular, has an effect on the way topics are cognitively construed. Existing studies on framing in linguistics have either been theoretical or descriptive. Going beyond such methodologically simple approaches, we use a more rigid test design involving the use of a control group, the construction of test conditions in which different Si…
The emergence of modification patterns in the Dutch noun phrase
This article gives a diachronic account of adnominal modification from Proto-Indo-European to present-day Dutch. The main conclusion is that through the ages, noun phrases appear to "fold out": they acquire their layered structure for different lexical modifiers over time. The latest stage in this process is the fairly recent development of a specific slot for interpersonal modification of the whole noun phrase. The different stages in the diachr…
A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch
Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ran…
Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch
Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e.g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection ( spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronicall…
Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change
Interpersonal modification in the English noun phrase
This article gives an overview of the various interpersonal modifiers in the English noun phrase, several of which seem to have been overlooked in formal as well as functional grammars. On the theoretical side, this article is concerned with how to bring the constructions at issue under a Functional Discourse Grammar representation (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2006, in prep.)
The emergence of modification patterns in the Dutch noun phrase
This article gives a diachronic account of adnominal modification from Proto-Indo-European to present-day Dutch. The main conclusion is that through the ages, noun phrases appear to "fold out": they acquire their layered structure for different lexical modifiers over time. The latest stage in this process is the fairly recent development of a specific slot for interpersonal modification of the whole noun phrase. The different stages in the diachr…
Interactional metadiscourse in research article abstracts
Adverbial Morphology
English marks the distinction between adjectives and adverbs with an adverbial suffix, whereas Dutch and German allow adjectives to be used adverbially without extra morphology. This may give rise to the idea that English, like Latin, is more specific in its classification of various types of modifiers. We propose an alternative analysis: Dutch and German draw a different dividing line, between attributive modifiers (NP-level) on the one hand, an…
The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP
This article inquires into the diachrony of the determiner in Dutch. First, it is argued that the determiner is an emergent syntactic category, and that it must be consequently excluded from universal grammar. Second, it is argued that languages that do have a determiner slot in the NP differ considerably with regard to which lexemes they allow in this function. On the basis of these two observations, an in depth usage-based analysis of the emerg…
A corpus-based account of the development of English such and Dutch zulk
On the basis of synchronic English language material, Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972) has put forward the hypothesis that intensifying meanings or “degree words” often develop from identifying expressions. This paper will empirically test Bolinger's hypothesis by means of in-depth diachronic study of the development of such —one of Bolinger's central examples—and of its Dutch cognate zulk in historical text corpora. To this aim, a detailed …
Does framing work? An empirical study of Simplifying Models for sustainable food production
We investigate empirically whether framing in general, and the use of Simplifying Models as a framing tool in particular, has an effect on the way topics are cognitively construed. Existing studies on framing in linguistics have either been theoretical or descriptive. Going beyond such methodologically simple approaches, we use a more rigid test design involving the use of a control group, the construction of test conditions in which different Si…
PP extraction and extraposition in Functional Discourse Grammar
A structural-functional account of NP-internal mood
Serving two masters
This paper examines two cases of so-called syntactic amalgams . In syntactic amalgams a particular string that is shared by two constructions is exploited to combine them, in such a way that one of the constructions functions as a modifier of the other. Typical examples are after God knows how many years (< after many years + God knows how many years ) and a big enough house (< a big house + big enough ). In formal theories, these kinds of constr…
On multiple source constructions in language change
peer reviewed
Homoplasy in diachronic grammar
Patroon en argument
Over patronen in taal en visies met verrassende argumenten in de Nederlandse taalkunde Naar aanleiding van het emeritaat van de Leuvense hoogleraren William Van Belle en Joop van der Horst hebben niet minder dan 80 collega’s uit binnen- en buitenland samen 53 artikelen geschreven over een breed scala van thema’s in de Nederlandse en algemene [...]
Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse
Recent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersona…
Patroon en argument
Intersubjectivity and intersubjectification in grammar and discourse
Intersubjectivity and intersubjectification
In this paper we present our views on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification with reference to case studies on adjectives, hedges, tags, honorifics, etc. Building on Diessel’s notion of “joint attention” and Traugott’s approach to intersubjectivity, we propose a distinction between three types of intersubjectivity: attitudinal, responsive, and textual. We evaluate and propose formal recognition criteria to operationalize this essentially sem…
(Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch
The discourse motivation for split-ergative alignment in Dutch nominalisations (and elsewhere)
Dutch nominalisations of the type het eten van vlees (‘the eating of meat’) have ergative alignment. The alignment is functionally motivated, in that it is a natural consequence of the flow of discourse. The functional account that is put forward here draws on the notion of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987) and on the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded discourse (Hopper & Thompson 1980). Support for this account comes fro…
Exaptation and Language Change
This volume is the first collection of papers that is exclusively dedicated to the concept of exaptation, a notion from evolutionary biology that was famously introduced into linguistics by Roger Lass in 1990. The past quarter-century has seen a heated debate on the properties of linguistic exaptation, its demarcation from other processes of linguistic change, and indeed the question of whether it is a useful concept in historical linguistics at …
Constructional contamination in morphology and syntax
In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced in Pijpops & Van de Velde (2016) . …
Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change
The real-time dynamics of the individual and the community in grammaticalization
Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propos…
Reassessing the evolution of West Germanic preterite inflection
This article takes a quantitative approach to the long-term dynamics of the preterite inflection in West Germanic, with a special focus on Dutch. In a first step, we replicate two often-cited studies on English and German ( Lieberman et al. 2007 and Carroll et al. 2012 , respectively) by looking at Dutch. This part also tackles some methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. In a second step, we delve deeper into the evolution of the pr…
Wayward categorial shift
Philosophy (36 obras) · Linguistics (33 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (26 obras) · Computer Science (25 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (20 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (14 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Grammar (12 obras) · Mathematics (12 obras)