Mij and Mijn in Dutch. A corpus study of historical variation from below.

The aim of this study is to analyze the variation of the first-person object pronoun, and its variants mij and mijn in historical Dutch, based on the Letters as Loot corpus. The corpus contains letters written in the 17th and the 18th centuries. In contemporary Dutch, mij (‘me’) is the standard variant for the object pronoun of ik (‘I’). In Early New Dutch, this variant was competing with mijn. The aim is to pinpoint and interpret the patterns that determined the variation of the first-person object pronoun and the choice of the variant mij as the standard one, and to extend the small survey of van der Wal (2007) with a larger dataset. This research is conducted following the Historical Sociolinguistics framework, that uses low language varieties and registers and correlates language internal and sociodemographic variables to describe and explain sociolinguistic variation (Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2012, 5). Therefore, diachronic, language-internal and language external...Show moreThe aim of this study is to analyze the variation of the first-person object pronoun, and its variants mij and mijn in historical Dutch, based on the Letters as Loot corpus. The corpus contains letters written in the 17th and the 18th centuries. In contemporary Dutch, mij (‘me’) is the standard variant for the object pronoun of ik (‘I’). In Early New Dutch, this variant was competing with mijn. The aim is to pinpoint and interpret the patterns that determined the variation of the first-person object pronoun and the choice of the variant mij as the standard one, and to extend the small survey of van der Wal (2007) with a larger dataset. This research is conducted following the Historical Sociolinguistics framework, that uses low language varieties and registers and correlates language internal and sociodemographic variables to describe and explain sociolinguistic variation (Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2012, 5). Therefore, diachronic, language-internal and language external variables have been taken in account. The results show that in the seventeenth century the morphological alternation was tendentially determined by the syntactic function of the pronoun (mij as a direct object, mijn as indirect object). This pattern is not found in South Holland where mijn is preferably used regardless of syntactic function. Diachronically, by the 18th-century mij takes over all the syntactic functions, and it is the preferred variant in all the regions. However, 30% of instances of the pronoun are encoded by mijn. The retention of some variation is due to the language usage of lower ranks, that do not exhibit diachronic differences. The shift toward mij as the object pronoun is a change from above, i.e. led by higher ranks of the society.Show less

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Mij and Mijn in Dutch. A corpus study of historical variation from below.