Abstract
Abstract Expect the unexpected. About the different ways in which the Dutch and the Flemish use er In this paper I report experimental data I have ignored for almost ten years because I did not know what to do with them. I still don’t know exactly, but the 25th anniversary of this journal is a key occasion to share them, if only because they fittingly illustrate that the syntax of Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch are diverging. The new data demonstrate that contrary to categorical Netherlandic intuitions that er is ungrammatical in sentences with a fronted locative (such as Op de envelop zat een postzegel), er is not only grammatical, but also beneficial to the Dutch language user. Compared to Belgian Dutch, however, the principal beneficiary of er’s processing advantage no longer is the subject noun phrase, but anything that follows.
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