2 Type noun-constructions in English and Dutch

Abstract

The articles of this section focus on specific issues in the synchronic description of the functions of constructions with type nouns (TNs) in English and German. This introduction addresses a number of problems in the received view of the diachrony of TN-constructions in English, viz. the absence of essential data such as TN-constructions in Old English and what we argue are errors and gaps in earlier analyses of English TN-constructions. It is important to provide a more adequate and comprehensive diachronic reconstruction, as these earlier studies have had a major impact on accounts of Germanic languages, amongst which those of English predominated. We start by establishing that there were two - not one - lexical source constructions in Old English, in which the TN is either head or modifier, and in which the dependent element is coded by a genitive. We show that the TN/head and TN/modifier constructions formed the source of two - rather than one - diachronic paths, along which constructions with grammaticalized functions developed in different ways than posited hitherto. We describe the transition from the synthetic coding of Old English to analytic coding in Middle English, noting that this was accompanied by a general tendency to develop variants with both pre- and postdependents. In this period, the defining steps were taken in the development of the TN/modifier constructions, whose historical trajectory we outline. We then focus on the trajectory of the TN/head constructions, whose constitutive developments took place in Modern English. For Present-day English we present a comprehensive typology, recognizing more TN-constructions and structural variants than distinguished in the literature on English so far. We research the counterparts of these in Present-day Dutch, by way of a first test of the newly proposed model.