- Author
- Year
- 2013
- Title
- Synchronic variation and loss of case: formal and informal language in a Dutch corpus of 17th-century Amsterdam texts
- Journal
- Diachronica
- Volume | Issue number
- 30 | 3
- Pages (from-to)
- 353-381
- Number of pages
- 29
- Document type
- Article
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
- Institute
- Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC)
- Abstract
-
A bias towards formal texts obscures our view of language change and gives a misleading impression of actual developments if ‘changes from below’ are in conflict with ‘changes from above,’ resulting from norms that are visible in particular in formal language. A corpus of 17th-century Amsterdam texts with varying levels of formality is assembled to study the loss of genitive and dative case-marking in Dutch. These results are compared with the use of present participle constructions, which serve as an extra variable to gauge how formal a text is. We argue that nominal case-marking no longer existed in informal language in 17th-century Amsterdam and that the genitive became a feature of formal norms and was hence subject to pressures from above.
- URL
- go to publisher's site
- Language
- English
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.410286
- Downloads
-
s3.pdf(Final published version)
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