A historical inquiry into the adjective phrase in Dutch.

In this project an inquiry is made into the syntax of the Dutch adjective from a diachronic point of view. The research hypothesis is that the adjective phrase has been expanded with various 'layers' in the course of time. Layering is a theoretical concept (see a.o. Siewierska 1992; Butler 1996, 2003; Butler & Taverniers 2008) that has been fruitfully used in syntactic research on the structure of the clause and the noun phrase. In this project it is used to model the changes in the adjective phrase (AP), which is the technical name for the syntactic group formed by the adjective (e.g. 'big') and its direct and indirect modifiers (e;g. 'very big'). The diachronic expansion of it can be illustrated by the following examples: (1) so eiselika thing ('zo vreselijke dingen') (10th century); (2) een by haer onbekenden deucht ('een bij hen onbekende deugd') (17th century); (3) een naar alle waarschijnlijkheid behoorlijk pakket secundaire arbeidsvoorwaarden (21st century). In example (1) the adjective 'eiselika' is accompanied by a grading adverb 'so'. This is the maximal size of the AP in Old Dutch (the period until 1200). Middle Dutch (1200-1500) allows heavier APs, a tendency which is carried through in Modern Dutch (from 1500 onward). The Early Modern Dutch example in (2) shows that adjectives can get spatial modifiers - belonging to a higher layer than the grading adverbs - which here takes the form of a prepositional phrase 'by hear'. The Late Modern Dutch example (3) is even more complex. Here the adjective is preceded by a modal modifier ('naar alle waarschijnlijkheid'), which is situated at yet a higher layer.

Keywords:Adjective phrase, Adjective, Layering, Noun phrase, Diachronic syntax, Functional linguistics

Disciplines:Linguistics, Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies