Internal constraints on the use of gaan versus zullen as future markers in spoken Dutch

Fehringer, Carol

doi:10.5117/nedtaa2017.3.fehr

Cited by 3 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The case for a modal interpretation of zullen, or indeed any future gram in weak-FTR languages, is compellingly presented by Broekhuis and Verkuyl (2014). They argue that since the Dutch present tense can be used to refer to a time span encompassing both before and after the time of speech, the contribution zullen must be purely modal (see also : Fehringer, 2018;Giannakidou, 2014). They give the following examples, wherein the uncontroversial modal auxiliaries of possibility, kunnen "may", and necessity, moeten "must", are contrasted with zullen "will":…”

Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally to these shared ways of expressing epistemic modality, Dutch and German also have systems of modal particles which can affect the modal strength of FTR statements, often subtly changing the modal valence of an expression when they co-occur with other modal morphemes (Fehringer, 2018;Nuyts, 2000). While a limited set of modal particles appear to independently epistemically affect statements (see Tables 3-4), we will not spend much time discussing these, as they appear to be a relatively minor way of expressing epistemic modality (Nuyts, 2000), and are generally more involved in marking the epistemic states of discourse participants, or expressing discourse attitudes (c.f.…”

Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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Recently, economists have used notions of linguistic relativity to suggest that grammatical constraints on Future Time Reference (FTR) affect whether people choose to take a small reward now or wait until later for a larger reward ("temporal discounting"). Economists hypothesize that habitual use of present tense constructions for FTR may cause speakers to perceive future rewards as temporally closer, and thereby as more valuable. This approach assumes that future tenses primarily encode when an event happens, which overlooks their widespread tendency to encode modal notions of probability. It additionally overlooks the importance of modal expressions in FTR. Since people discount value as a function of both temporal distance and the probability of a reward being received, it is important to understand what different FTR tenses actually encode, as well as cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality. We therefore modified the EUROTYP questionnaire to elicit future tense as well as modal FTR constructions across a range of temporal distances and probabilities for speakers of English, Dutch, and German. We find that in English tense and probability are more strictly grammaticized than in Dutch or German, and that increasing temporal distance from speaker "now" tended to cause English and German – but not Dutch – speakers to use more uncertain terms. These results highlight the importance of modality for typological linguists working on FTR, and suggest economists working on linguistic relativity and psychological discounting should consider cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality and in the modal semantics of future tenses.

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Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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“…), this combination of zullen and gaan is "definitely not uncommon." No regional differences are mentioned, although it is well known that gaan itself as a future marker is more productive in BD (for example, Colleman 2000, Fehringer 2017).…”

Section: Auxiliariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previously, primary data were often culled from monumental dialect atlases such as Blancquaert and Pée's Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen (RND). 5 Since the 2000s, an ever growing body of (predominantly Flemish) studies has been going beyond impressionistic assessments of (mostly) absolute differences (in particular, Grondelaers, Speelman, & Carbonez 2001, Grondelaers et al 2002, De Sutter 2005, Tummers 2005, Vandekerckhove 2005, Diepeveen et al 2006, Speelman & Geeraerts 2009, Colleman 2010, Levshina et al 2013, Gyselinck & Colleman 2016, Fehringer 2017, Pijpops & F. Van de Velde 2018, Pijpops 2019, 2020. 6 Building on careful statistical analysis of corpus data, many of these studies were able to gauge not only the distribution of competing grammatical constructions in BD and ND, but, crucially, also the nature and the significance of the language-internal and language-external factors that determine choices in both varieties and the extent to which they do so.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natiolectal Variation in Dutch Morphosyntax: A Large-Scale, Data-Driven Perspective

Troij

Grondelaers²,

Speelman³

2023

J Ger Ling

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In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

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“…There are also regional differences, for instance, gaan is more common and may be more grammaticized in West‐Flemish Dutch as compared to (Northern) Dutch (Behydt, 2005; Fehringer, 2018). Like will , modern zullen seems characterized by an admixture between modal and temporal semantics (Kirsner, 1969; also see: Janssen, 1989; Fehringer, 2018; Olmen, Mortelmans, & Auwera, 2009; Sluijs, 2011)—a statement that applies to many future “tenses.”…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not When But Whether: Modality and Future Time Reference in English and Dutch

Robertson¹,

Roberts

2023

Cognitive Science

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Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g., will) causing speakers to construe future events as more temporally distal and thereby to exhibit increased “temporal discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the delay until they will occur increases. However, several aspects of this hypothesis are incomplete. First, it overlooks the role of “modal” FTR structures which encode notions about the likelihood of future outcomes (e.g., might). This may influence “probability discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the probability of their occurrence decreases. Second, the extent to which linguistic structures are subjectively related to temporal or probability discounting differences is currently unknown. To address these, we elicited FTR language and subjective ratings of temporal distance and probability from speakers of English, which exhibits strongly grammaticized FTR, and Dutch, which does not. Several findings went against the predictions of the previous hypothesis: Framing an FTR statement in the present (“Ellie arrives later on”) versus the future tense (“…will arrive…”) did not affect ratings of temporal distance; English speakers rated future statements as relatively more temporally proximal than Dutch speakers; and English and Dutch speakers rated future tenses as encoding high certainty, which suggests that obligatory future tense marking might result in less discounting. Additionally, compared with Dutch speakers, English speakers used more low‐certainty terms in general (e.g., may) and as a function of various experimental factors. We conclude that the prior cross‐linguistic observations of the link between FTR and psychological discounting may be caused by the connection between low‐certainty modal structures and probability discounting, rather than future tense and temporality.

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Internal constraints on the use of gaan versus zullen as future markers in spoken Dutch

Abstract: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints-eprint.ncl.ac.uk Fehringer C. Internal constraints on the use of gaan versus zullen as future markers in spoken Dutch.

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Natiolectal Variation in Dutch Morphosyntax: A Large-Scale, Data-Driven Perspective

Not When But Whether: Modality and Future Time Reference in English and Dutch

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