De dochter doet een powernap: Definite article possessives with kinship terms in Dutch

While kinship relations in Dutch
are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have
recently observed to use a definite article in that position. To
learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we
performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article
possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We
analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the
type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon
is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a
definite article. The construction was most frequent with descending
and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e.,
terms with a non-kin meaning at least as prominent as kinship use;
Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm 2001:202). These findings were explained
by pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the
construction creates.