Consanguinity and Possession in Varieties of Dutch

Southern varieties of Dutch use the 1st person plural form of the possessive pronoun ons as a marker of consanguinity with proper names, as in ons Emma ‘Emma, our consanguineous family member’. This use of ons ‘our’ has some remarkable properties: It is incompatible with adjectival modification and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Germanic linguistics 2017-03, Vol.29 (1), p.1-25
Main Authors: Rooryck, Johan, Schoorlemmer, Erik
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Southern varieties of Dutch use the 1st person plural form of the possessive pronoun ons as a marker of consanguinity with proper names, as in ons Emma ‘Emma, our consanguineous family member’. This use of ons ‘our’ has some remarkable properties: It is incompatible with adjectival modification and contrastive stress. These properties are shared with a construction from Standard Dutch: complex prenominal s- possessors consisting of the 1st person singular form of the possessive pronoun and a kinship term as in mijn vaders fiets ‘my father's bike’. We propose that both these constructions are constructional idioms (Booij 2002), a lexical template with a variable part. This offers a straightforward account of the properties of these constructions. *
ISSN:1470-5427
1475-3014
DOI:10.1017/S1470542716000258