De dochter doet een powernap ; Definite article possessives with kinship terms in Dutch

Abstract While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The con... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Suijkerbuijk, Michelle
Leufkens, Sterre
van der Meulen, Marten
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Reihe/Periodikum: Linguistics in the Netherlands ; Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022 ; volume 39, page 192-208 ; ISSN 0929-7332 1569-9919
Verlag/Hrsg.: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27433704
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.00069.suij

Abstract While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The construction was most frequent with descending and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e. terms with a non-kin meaning at least as prominent as kinship use; Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm 2001 : 202). These findings were explained by pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the construction creates.