The development of Dutch connectives : change and acquisition as windows on form-function relations

The Dutch language displays a variety of connectives, words that instruct readers and listeners about the nature of the coherence relation between two clauses. These words (e.g. omdat 'because', maar 'but', and dus 'so') not only differ in the exact relation they explicate, but also in their syntactic characteristics. The first aim of this thesis is to unravel the very subtle ways in which Dutch speakers and writers exploit the syntactic possibilities of their connectives to support the exact meaning they want to convey. To this end, the author adopts a developmental approach to the investigat... Mehr ...