Sjef Barbier
Biographic Data
| ID | 963907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sjef Barbier |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sjef |
| FAMILY NAME | Barbier |
| SIGNATURE | BARBIER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4983-7472 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
On the category and morphosyntax of numerals
This paper investigates the morphosyntax of numerals. Based on Russian and Dutch, we show that a division into three subcategories is necessary: (i) numeral ONE;1 (ii) Cardinals ≥ TWO; (iii) Indefinite Numerals such as MANY (cf., Barbiers 2007). We introduce a bi-partite structure, in which a low Classifier projection is connected to a high Classifier projection by an (abstract) preposition. Building on Borer (2005), Barbiers (2007), Kayne (2019)…
On the asymmetry of wh-doubling in varieties of German and Dutch
This paper combines experimental, theoretical and quantitative approaches to syntactic microvariation. The empirical goal is to clarify the situation with respect to wh-doubling (also: wh-copying) in varieties of German and Dutch. With a large-scale survey in the German and Dutch language areas we sought to establish which speakers allow wh-doubling, which speakers allow right-complexity, i.e., configurations in which the lower copy of the wh-dep…
Apparent syntax-semantics mismatches in the distribution of adverbs. Why semantics alone is not enough: A reply to Fortuin (2022)
Fortuin (2022) argues that the syntactic analysis of two types of syntax-semantics mismatches in the distribution of adverbs proposed in Barbiers (2018) can be reduced to semantics. This would have the advantage that syntactic movement does not need to be assumed. Although I agree that the syntactic analysis I provided in (2018), and, more generally, the syntactic hierarchy of adverbs proposed in Cinque (1999), needs to be complemented with a sem…
The syntax of progressive and ingressive aanhet -constructions in Dutch
This paper presents a novel syntactic analysis of the much-debated Dutch aanhet -construction, e.g. Pieter is aan het opruimen ‘lit. Peter is on the cleanup: Peter is cleaning up’. We show that the construction’s syntactic behavior varies with the matrix verb: progressive zijn ‘be’ versus ingressive gaan ‘go’ and slaan ‘hit’. Based on this variation, we argue that there are two aanhet -projections occupying different synchronic positions on a fun…
Sanne Berends. Acquiring Dutch quantitative ER
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Poor weak het ‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts
This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het ‘it’: het ‘it’ has a third person (3p) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het ‘it’ is different from all personal …
Many systems, one strategy: Acquiring ordinals in Dutch and English
This study compares ordinal acquisition in Dutch and English, and shows that both groups of learners acquire ordinals via a rule, rather than lexically. Our evidence comes from a Give-X type comprehension task (cf. Wynn 1992, Meyer et al. 2018, under review) which we administered to 70 Dutch L1 learners (2;08–4;11) and 35 learners of American English (3;3–5;3). The data not only offer a replication of the core findings in Meyer et al. (2018), sho…
Laboratoriumzinnen in het tijdperk van de kwantitatieve taalkunde
Laboratory sentences in the era of quantitative linguistics This paper briefly compares an early (1996) and a later (2010) article that I published in Nederlandse Taalkunde, concentrating on the different methodologies underlying the two papers: A formal theoretical in-depth analysis of one idiolect in the first paper and a large-scale quantitative and theoretical approach in the second. It is argued that the two methods make different contributi…
A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences
Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve “free” translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance betwe…
Merging verb cluster variation
In this paper we argue that verb clusters in Dutch varieties are merged and linearized in fully ascending (1-2-3) or fully descending (3-2-1) orders. We argue that verb clusters that deviate from these orders involve non-verbal material: adjectival participles, or nominal infinitives. As a result, our approach does not involve any unmotivated movements that are specific for verb clusters. Support for our analysis comes from (i) the interpretation…
Modal Auxiliaries
In many languages modal auxiliaries such as English can , must , may , need , will , ought , want are ambiguous between two types of interpretations: epistemic and root interpretations. In the epistemic interpretation the modal expresses how likely it is that a proposition is true (for example, necessarily, possibly, probably true) while in the root interpretations the modal expresses the obligatoriness, permissibility, desirability, or possibili…
MIcrocomparative MOrphosyntactic REsearch (Mimore): Mapping partial grammars of Flemish, Brabantish and Dutch
Perfect doubling
The focus of this paper is the syntax of the so-called perfect doubling construction as it occurs in dialects of Dutch, namely cases of compound tenses featuring an additional, participial have (or be). We examine the properties of the construction on the basis of recent fieldwork research, and propose an analysis, whose starting point is the assumption that auxiliary doubling as such does not exist; what we have, rather, is the perfect tense of …
Syntactic doubling and the structure of wh -chains
This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh -dependencies attested in dialects of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first (or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this generalization follows fr…
Locus and limits of syntactic microvariation
Microvariation in Syntactic Doubling
Syntactic doubling is the phenomenon in which a constituent, i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word or phrase, is expressed two or more times within a clause. Since such duplicates are often redundant in that they do not contribute to semantic interpretation, the question arises as to why they are possible or necessary. This theoretical question becomes even more urgent in view of the fact that closely related language varieties such as …
Indefinite numerals one and many and the cause of ordinal suppletion
Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects
This paper discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various choices we had to make in order to realize the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND) in a relatively short period.The idea is that by presenting the SAND in this way, we enable the ScanDiaSyn project and other new dialect syntax projects to profit from our experience in a similar enterprise.The presentation and explicitation of the choices we had to make, the prob…
On the different verbal behavior of auxiliaries
Dimensions of Movement: From features to remnants
This volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative research into the properties of phrasal and feature movement, which explore these key syntactic phenomena from different angles and across languages. The papers advance or build on models of movement which capitalize either on generalized feature movement or on generalized remnant movement. Both these approaches attempt to develop a restrictive theory of movement aiming at a simplif…
Modality and its interaction with the verbal system
Remnant stranding and the theory of Movement
Local economy. Elementary operations and optimal derivations
English and Dutch as SOV-Languages and the Distribution of CP-Complements
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Another case of scrambling in Dutch
Preview this article: Another case of scrambling in Dutch, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.12.04bar-1.gif
Indefinite numerals one and many and the cause of ordinal suppletion
Locus and limits of syntactic microvariation
Syntactic doubling and the structure of wh -chains
This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh -dependencies attested in dialects of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first (or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this generalization follows fr…
Perfect doubling
The focus of this paper is the syntax of the so-called perfect doubling construction as it occurs in dialects of Dutch, namely cases of compound tenses featuring an additional, participial have (or be). We examine the properties of the construction on the basis of recent fieldwork research, and propose an analysis, whose starting point is the assumption that auxiliary doubling as such does not exist; what we have, rather, is the perfect tense of …
Adjectives as auxiliaries of the noun phrase
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Another case of scrambling in Dutch
Preview this article: Another case of scrambling in Dutch, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.12.04bar-1.gif
English and Dutch as SOV-Languages and the Distribution of CP-Complements
Preview this article: English and Dutch as SOV-Languages and the Distribution of CP-Complements, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.15.04bar-1.gif
Local economy. Elementary operations and optimal derivations
Dimensions of Movement: From features to remnants
This volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative research into the properties of phrasal and feature movement, which explore these key syntactic phenomena from different angles and across languages. The papers advance or build on models of movement which capitalize either on generalized feature movement or on generalized remnant movement. Both these approaches attempt to develop a restrictive theory of movement aiming at a simplif…
Modality and its interaction with the verbal system
Remnant stranding and the theory of Movement
On the different verbal behavior of auxiliaries
Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects
This paper discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various choices we had to make in order to realize the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND) in a relatively short period.The idea is that by presenting the SAND in this way, we enable the ScanDiaSyn project and other new dialect syntax projects to profit from our experience in a similar enterprise.The presentation and explicitation of the choices we had to make, the prob…
Indefinite numerals one and many and the cause of ordinal suppletion
Microvariation in Syntactic Doubling
Syntactic doubling is the phenomenon in which a constituent, i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word or phrase, is expressed two or more times within a clause. Since such duplicates are often redundant in that they do not contribute to semantic interpretation, the question arises as to why they are possible or necessary. This theoretical question becomes even more urgent in view of the fact that closely related language varieties such as …
Syntactic doubling and the structure of wh -chains
This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh -dependencies attested in dialects of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first (or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this generalization follows fr…
Locus and limits of syntactic microvariation
Perfect doubling
The focus of this paper is the syntax of the so-called perfect doubling construction as it occurs in dialects of Dutch, namely cases of compound tenses featuring an additional, participial have (or be). We examine the properties of the construction on the basis of recent fieldwork research, and propose an analysis, whose starting point is the assumption that auxiliary doubling as such does not exist; what we have, rather, is the perfect tense of …
MIcrocomparative MOrphosyntactic REsearch (Mimore): Mapping partial grammars of Flemish, Brabantish and Dutch
Modal Auxiliaries
In many languages modal auxiliaries such as English can , must , may , need , will , ought , want are ambiguous between two types of interpretations: epistemic and root interpretations. In the epistemic interpretation the modal expresses how likely it is that a proposition is true (for example, necessarily, possibly, probably true) while in the root interpretations the modal expresses the obligatoriness, permissibility, desirability, or possibili…
Merging verb cluster variation
In this paper we argue that verb clusters in Dutch varieties are merged and linearized in fully ascending (1-2-3) or fully descending (3-2-1) orders. We argue that verb clusters that deviate from these orders involve non-verbal material: adjectival participles, or nominal infinitives. As a result, our approach does not involve any unmotivated movements that are specific for verb clusters. Support for our analysis comes from (i) the interpretation…
A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences
Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve “free” translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance betwe…
Many systems, one strategy: Acquiring ordinals in Dutch and English
This study compares ordinal acquisition in Dutch and English, and shows that both groups of learners acquire ordinals via a rule, rather than lexically. Our evidence comes from a Give-X type comprehension task (cf. Wynn 1992, Meyer et al. 2018, under review) which we administered to 70 Dutch L1 learners (2;08–4;11) and 35 learners of American English (3;3–5;3). The data not only offer a replication of the core findings in Meyer et al. (2018), sho…
Laboratoriumzinnen in het tijdperk van de kwantitatieve taalkunde
Laboratory sentences in the era of quantitative linguistics This paper briefly compares an early (1996) and a later (2010) article that I published in Nederlandse Taalkunde, concentrating on the different methodologies underlying the two papers: A formal theoretical in-depth analysis of one idiolect in the first paper and a large-scale quantitative and theoretical approach in the second. It is argued that the two methods make different contributi…
Sanne Berends. Acquiring Dutch quantitative ER
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Poor weak het ‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts
This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het ‘it’: het ‘it’ has a third person (3p) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het ‘it’ is different from all personal …
Apparent syntax-semantics mismatches in the distribution of adverbs. Why semantics alone is not enough: A reply to Fortuin (2022)
Fortuin (2022) argues that the syntactic analysis of two types of syntax-semantics mismatches in the distribution of adverbs proposed in Barbiers (2018) can be reduced to semantics. This would have the advantage that syntactic movement does not need to be assumed. Although I agree that the syntactic analysis I provided in (2018), and, more generally, the syntactic hierarchy of adverbs proposed in Cinque (1999), needs to be complemented with a sem…
The syntax of progressive and ingressive aanhet -constructions in Dutch
This paper presents a novel syntactic analysis of the much-debated Dutch aanhet -construction, e.g. Pieter is aan het opruimen ‘lit. Peter is on the cleanup: Peter is cleaning up’. We show that the construction’s syntactic behavior varies with the matrix verb: progressive zijn ‘be’ versus ingressive gaan ‘go’ and slaan ‘hit’. Based on this variation, we argue that there are two aanhet -projections occupying different synchronic positions on a fun…
On the asymmetry of wh-doubling in varieties of German and Dutch
This paper combines experimental, theoretical and quantitative approaches to syntactic microvariation. The empirical goal is to clarify the situation with respect to wh-doubling (also: wh-copying) in varieties of German and Dutch. With a large-scale survey in the German and Dutch language areas we sought to establish which speakers allow wh-doubling, which speakers allow right-complexity, i.e., configurations in which the lower copy of the wh-dep…
Linguistics (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (15 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (13 works) · Natural language processing (10 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · History (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works)