| dc.description.abstract | In 17th-century Dutch, the construction with the elements zoo ‘so’ and zulck ‘such’, an adjective and a noun has many variants. The possible variants of this construction are given below. In the change from 17th-century Dutch to 21st-century Dutch, some of the variants of this construction gradually disappeared.
Variant 17th century 21st century
So-adjective zoo grote man *zo grote man
So-adjective-a zoo groot een man *zo groot een man
So-adjective+en zoo groten man *zo groten man
So-a-adjective zoo een grote man zo’n grote man
A-so-adjective een zoo grote man een zo grote man
Such-adjective zulcke grote man *zulke grote man
Such-adjective-a *zulck groot een man *zulk groot een man
Such+en-adjective+en zulcken groten man *zulken groten man
Such-a-adjective zulck een grote man ??zulk een grote man
A-such-adjective *een zulck slecht hotel *een zulke grote man
The main research question of this thesis is: How did the so/such-adjective-noun-construction develop within 17th-century Dutch and in the change from 17th-century Dutch to Standard Dutch, and how can we explain this development?
The emergence and disappearance of some of the variants can be explained by the grammaticalization process of zoo and zulck. In the 17th century, zoo partially grammaticalized, and therefore it received another reading. Before this grammaticalization, zoo only had an intensifying reading. Having an intensifying property is a characteristic of the lexical category adverbs. In the 17th century, zoo got an identifying reading as well, which is a typical reading for the syntactic category determiners, i.e. a functional category. And because grammaticalization is a change from being a lexical category to being a functional category, the direction of change in zoo (from lexical to more functional) is to be expected. Due to the extra possible reading of zoo, the variants so-a-adjective and a-so-adjective emerged.
Zulck is grammaticalized as well. Within the 17th-century, zulck could behave both adjective-like (e.g. it had a predicative use) and determiner-like (e.g. it could express reference). After the 17th century, zulck lost some adjective-like characteristics, and became more determiner-like. The direction of this change is to be expected in a grammaticalization process, because zulck changed from being in a lexical category (adjective) to a functional category (determiner). This change in zulck caused the variant such-a-adjective to disappear. | |
