Abstract Wouden
Dutch as a construction language: the case of prepositions
We report on ongoing research into the building blocks of spoken language. More in particular, we will discuss some of our methods to isolate recurrent, possibly interesting, word combinations from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) (Oostdijk et al. 2002), from the broader perspective of getting an emperically based view on the division of labor between grammar and the lexicon. In earlier work, we argued that, contrary to accepted practice, collocation research (Hausmann 1989-1991) and collocation extraction methods (Manning & Schütze 1999) should not be restricted to combinations containing at least one content word. Let us illustrate this with one simple example. In Dutch, one finds the combination ook maar that makes negative polarity items when combined with indefinite pronouns (Paardekooper 1979; Zwarts 1981; Vandeweghe 1981; Haspelmath 1997), a property not following from those of the constituting parts (cf. German auch nur, English at all):
(1) Niemand heeft ook maar iets gezien ‘nobody saw anything’
(2) ?Niemand heeft maar iets gezien ‘nobody saw only something’
(3) ?Niemand heeft ook iets gezien ‘nobody saw something as well’
(4) *Iemand heeft ook maar iets gezien ‘somebody saw anything’
Earlier, we have reported on investigations into collocational and constructional behavior in the realm of particles (van der Wouden 2001; van der Wouden 2002) and interjections (van der Wouden 2005). In this paper, we will present results of extending our research into the domain of prepositions.
References
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