Within the dynamic linguistic situation of the Dutch Golden Age, we observe a type of language variation that has rarely been addressed before: variation within individual language users (intra-author variation). This becomes especially clear in the way 17th century authors use negation: they express negation in the Middle Dutch way (i.e. embracing negation, a combination of the negative clitic en and a negative particle niet; compare French ne…pas) as well as in the modern way (single negation: niet). In this Nederlab pilot project, we aim to describe and analyze in detail the linguistic and literary/rhetorical contexts in which these two variants of negation occur within the letters of the famous Dutch author and politician P.C. Hooft, written between 1600 and 1638. In this period, he used both forms of negation: as earlier research has demonstrated, Hooft stopped using embracing negation in 1638. This pilot project will enrich Hooft’s letters in the Nederlab corpus in such a way that we are able to search for grammatical properties that are specific for 17th century Dutch. We will then analyze in which linguistic, literary and sociolinguistic contexts specific types of negation and negation particles were used.

• dr. M.P. (Marijn) Schraagen
• Cora van de Poppe MA
• dr. Feike Dietz

The vibrant political, religious and cultural atmosphere of the Dutch Golden Age interacted with language. 17^th century Dutch was a mixture of fading linguistic properties from the preceding language phase, Middle Dutch, and upcoming new ways to construct words and sentences. These language innovations were partly driven by migration, literary innovations and standardization processes.

Within these language dynamics we observe a type of language variation that has rarely been addressed before: variation within individual language users (intra-author variation). The famous author P.C. Hooft, for instance, uses the Middle Dutch way to express negation as well as a modern alternative. How can we account for this variation, seemingly randomly displayed by authors? This project will chart and explain the grammatical properties of intra-author variation, as well as the social- and literary-cultural factors that influenced the way individual authors used their variation in a strategic and/or creative way. The central hypothesis of the project is that the (internal) grammars of authors created a particular range of variation, which was systematically used by authors, based on contextual factors.

We develop a new line of interdisciplinary research as a necessary condition for an in-depth understanding of language variation, combining approaches from theoretical linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, computational linguistics and literary studies. We qualitatively investigate 1) how variation follows from the (internal) grammar, and 2) is related to the social and literary context, and we quantitatively investigate 3) variation patterns within and between authors and genres.

• dr. Feike Dietz
• Cora van de Poppe MA
• dr. M.P. (Marijn) Schraagen
• Joanna Wall MA

Project summary:
Possession is a fundamental concept of human culture. All cultures have a concept of
ownership. The boundary between what is yours and what is mine may differ from culture to
culture, and from individual to individual. Nevertheless, some things can only be yours or
mine, for instance body parts or family members.
Human language reflects this basic distinction between things that are intrinsically yours and
things that are not. Most human languages make a grammatical distinction between
transferable entities such as your car, my watch, or Mary’s money and untransferable
entities such as body parts (my hand, your leg, her finger) and kinship relations (my sister,
John’s grandfather). The occurrence of this basic distinction in many genetically unrelated
languages suggests that it is an inherent part of the human language faculty.
The main aim of this project is to investigate the various ways in which language categorizes
possession, how these are morphosyntactically encoded across and within languages, and
how this distinction should be represented in a model of the language faculty.

• prof. dr. J.E.C.V. Rooryck (Universiteit Leiden). dr. E. Schoorlemmer (Universiteit Leiden)
• drs. L. Karvovskaya (Universiteit Leiden)

Although the languages of the world may appear incredibly diverse to a casual observer, a closer look reveals that they are remarkably similar at the deeper level of grammar. Compared to the infinite variety of how languages could construct their sentences, the underlying syntax tends to cluster in limited areas of the available space of possibilities. This underlying sameness has led to the concept of Universal Grammar (UG), a set of grammatical properties underlying all languages. UG consists of properties which are invariably the same for each language, Principles. Other properties, Parameters, have to be set in one of a limited number of ways. Since the set of parameters and the range of options to fix them are restricted in the same way for all languages, variation between languages is also systematically limited.

This project focuses on one of the core issues in linguistic variation research: the question of whether macrovariation (variation between unrelated languages, e.g. Japanese vs. Swahili), microvariation (variation between related languages/dialects, e.g. Norwegian vs. Icelandic) and diachronic change (variation between diachronic stages of a language Middle Dutch vs. Old Dutch) can be reduced to the same parameters.

      The specific research topic of this project is the variation in the expression of subject-predicate relations, a core relation in human language. In a sentence such as He dances, the predicate dance describes a property of the subject He. Surprisingly, languages differ in their expression of this basic relation. Even more surprising is that the Dutch languages (including Dutch dialects, Frisian, Negerhollands and Afrikaans) show a similar range of variation in this area, both synchronically and diachronically.

The project aims to investigate whether these surface similarities between macrovariation, synchronic and diachronic microvariation are also present on a deeper level of grammar. 

website: www.linguisticvariation.com