Going city: Directional predicates and preposition incorporation in youth vernaculars of Dutch

Gert-Jan Schoenmakers, John David Storment

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In certain varieties of Dutch spoken among young people, the preposition and determiner in locative anddirectional PPs can sometimes be omitted. We argue on the basis of language data taken from Twitter and intuitions of youngspeakers of Dutch that nominal arguments in these constructions do not have a DP layer, the absence of which leads to a specialinterpretation. The option to omit the preposition is related to the structural and semantic complexity of the verb. The bareconstruction is possible only with simple verbs, and not with manner-of-motion verbs. We present an analysis that accounts for thenon-pronunciation of prepositions in directional predicates by claiming that they can be licensed through incorporation into theverb. This type of incorporation is blocked if the verb is structurally complex.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)65-80
Number of pages15
JournalLinguistics in the Netherlands
Volume38
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 29 Oct 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • bare singular nominals
  • directional resultatives
  • Dutch youth vernaculars
  • manner-of-motion verbs
  • null prepositions

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