Bachelor thesis | Nederlandse taal en cultuur (BA)
closed access
An utterance without a finite verb can be seen as an expressive construction in the Dutch language (in Dutch ‘Zin Zonder Persoonsvorm’: ZZP). An example of this construction is: Dus ik naar de...Show moreAn utterance without a finite verb can be seen as an expressive construction in the Dutch language (in Dutch ‘Zin Zonder Persoonsvorm’: ZZP). An example of this construction is: Dus ik naar de bakker (‘So I to the bakery’). The existing literature on the characteristics of ZZP’s is limited. Hence, this thesis addresses the following research question: what are the characteristics of ZZP’s and how can these characteristics best be analysed? In answering this question, two theoretical perspectives are elaborated: generative grammar and construction grammar. Three methods were used, namely acceptability judgment based on my own intuitions, an informal acceptability judgment test and an additional corpus research. The results demonstrate that a ZZP presumably needs a process and an endpoint. The perspective of the generative grammar shows that a ZZP is likely to be a full Complementizer Phrase (CP). It also shows that, in the beginning, there is a structure in the ellipsis site that is deleted at Phonological From (PF): the deletion analysis. The perspective of the construction grammar shows that ZZP’s can be put in a construction network with more abstract and more specific constructions: pairings of form and meaning. Both the generative grammar and the construction grammar perspective provide useful analyses of the ZZP, although leading to different outcomes.Show less
