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A Uniform Account of the Dutch of in Inquisitive

Semantics

Elynn Weijland (13895958)

December 19, 2022

1 Introduction

Like many other function words, the Dutch word of can be used in a variety of

ways. The word of is often used as an operator which combines two sentences or

phrases and forms their disjunction. However, this is not the only use of the Dutch

of. Unlike some languages, Dutch does not have its own question marker: of is

additionally used for this purpose. This contrasts with English, for instance, which

has if as a distinct question marker (Jayaseelan, 2018).

In general, the Dutch of is most commonly used in the following constructions:

(1) Ze komt naar het feest of ze gaat met haar zus uit eten.

She comes to the party or she has dinner with her sister.

(2) Ze vertelt me morgen of ze naar het feest komt.

Tomorrow, she will tell me if/whether she will come to the party.

(3) Ze vertelt me morgen wie of er naar het feest komt.

Tomorrow, she will tell me who will come to the party.

In these sentences, we indeed see these different behaviors of of. Sentence (1) treats

of in a similar way to the English connective or. Here, the two clauses ‘ze komt

naar het feest’ and ‘ze gaat met haar zus uit eten’ are combined to form their

disjunction. In constrast, sentence (2) and (3) adopt a different use for of. In both

of these cases, of is used as a question particle, hence it introduces a question that

is being posed. For (2), this is an embedded polar question: one can answer either

yes or no, while for (3), of introduces an embedded wh-question. Furthermore, in

(3), the use of of is optional, while this is not the case for its other uses.

This paper tries to find a uniform analysis of the Dutch of in Inquisitive Semantics

(for an overview of Inquisitive Semantics, see (Ciardelli, Groenendijk & Roelofsen,

2018)). This analysis can account for the multiple ways in which of behaves in the

above constructions.

Note that in this paper, of is only considered in constructions where it combines

clauses, rather than acts like a disjunction in general. This means that sentences

such as (4) are not contemplated in this paper (for a generalized account of con- junction and disjunction, see (Partee & Rooth, 2008)).

(4) Bill of Marie komt naar het feest.

Bill or Marie comes to the party.

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First, I will briefly discuss how the use of the Dutch of developed over time. After

this, I introduce the notions from Inquisitive Semantics that are necessary for the

formal analysis of of. I then discuss the data in more detail: what exactly does the

analysis need to capture? Lastly, I present my hypothesis, and how this analysis

accounts for the behavior of of in the above constructions.

2 Background

2.1 The development of of in Dutch over time

To study the development of the use of of over time, I have utilized three cor- pora: Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands (Depuydt, 2022a), Corpus Middelnederlands

(Depuydt, 2022b) and Corpus Oudnederlands (Depuydt, 2022c). These three cor- pora were created by the Institutuut voor Nederlandse taal (INT), the Institute

for Dutch Language.

Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands (CHN) (Depuydt, 2022a) contains data from present- day Dutch. It is a large dataset: the CHN contains over 2.5 million texts from

books, blogs, newspapers, magazines and more, and is updated every month. This

brings the total number of tokens in the dataset to over one billion. Going back

in time, Corpus Middelnederlands (Depuydt, 2022b) is a dataset containing Dutch

rhyme and prose texts, bible verses and scientific texts from the thirteen- to fif- teenhundreds. The Corpus Oudnederlands (Depuydt, 2022c) then contains Dutch

religious texts from even further back in history: before the year 1200. For the lat- ter two corpora, I used the Woordenboek Middelnederlands (De Bonth, 2020a) and

Woordenboek Oudnederlands (De Bonth, 2020b), two online dictionaries. Since

the translations of the sentences found in the corpora were not provided, I found

these translations using the dictionaries. In all three corpora, all lexical items in

the text are labelled with their part-of-speech (POS) tag. These POS tags provide

information on the part-of-speech of the token in the text, such as nouns, verbs, etc.

Studying the data from these three corpora, there are two main observations that

can be made. Before I consider these observations, note that the Corpus Mid- delnederlands (Depuydt, 2022b) and Corpus Oudnederlands (Depuydt, 2022c) are

relatively small datasets. They only contain a couple of texts in comparison to the

2.5 million of CHN. Additionally, these texts are often religious texts. Hence, these

corpora might not be the most representative of the actual spoken Dutch in these

times. However, the data captured in these corpora is all that is available.

As a first observation, it is clear that in general, the use of the word of in Dutch

has increased over time. Examining the number of hits for the word of shows us

that in Corpus Oudnederlands (Depuydt, 2022c), the lexical item of only makes

up 0.118% of tokens, while this is 0.265% for Corpus Middelnederlands (Depuydt,

2022b) and 0.307% for CHN (Depuydt, 2022a). Hence, a steady increase in the

use of of, the more time passes, can be observed.

Analyzing the different uses of of in these three corpora, an interesting pattern

can be observed. In Oudnederlands, of only seems to be used when it behaves like

a question particle that introduces a polar question. Other kinds of behavior of

of are not found in this corpus. An example of a phrase in Oudnederlands can be

found below (presented here with the present-day Dutch and English translation).

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It is clear to see that the construction of this phrase is similar to that of (2): of

acts like a question particle and introduces a polar question.

(5) ... ik ne weiz of se iz ug dun wille.

... ik weet niet of ze het voor jullie willen doen.

... I do not know if they want to do that for you.

Comparing the data from Corpus Oudnederlands (Depuydt, 2022a), to Corpus

Middelnederlands (Depuydt, 2022b), there is a clear shift in the use of of. Similarly

to Oudnederlands, of is still used as an embedded polar question marker (see (6)).

However, of is now also used as a disjunction operator. This use has developed

rapidly, and is now the most popular use of that time. An example of is given in

(7):

(6) Laet vragen of hijt wille uercopen.

Laten we vragen of hij het wil overkopen.

Let’s ask if he wants to buy this from us.

(7) ... die sal mi doot slaen of ic sal sijn hooft gheuen tot enen presente.

... die zal mij dood slaan of ik zal zijn hoofd geven als een cadeau.

... who will kick me to death or I will give his head as a present.

Lastly, we see that the use of of in Middelnederlands and present-day Dutch is very

similar. It is still most common to use of as a disjunction, after which of as an

embedded polar question marker is used most frequently. However, a new use of of

has emerged, in which of is still a question particle, but now marks an embedded

wh-question. An instance of of with this use is presented below, together with the

English translation. Note here that this use of of is not very popular, it is more

common to omit of in these types of constructions. 1

(8) ... toen we informeerden wat of er aan de hand was.

... when we informed what was going on.

Concluding: the use of of has increased over time. It was first used as an embedded

polar question marker, but later became more commonly used as a disjunction. In

the last 500 years, the use of of as an embedded wh-question marker has emerged,

even though this use of of is not very common.

2.2 Or in InqB

In the First-Order variant of Inquisitive Semantics: InqB, declarative and interroga- tive clauses receive a uniform treatment. These two types of clauses are represented

as propositions, which are non-empty sets of information states (sets of possible

worlds), for which every information state resolves the issue that is raised by the

proposition (Ciardelli et al., 2018). Additionally, the propositions are downward- closed: if an information state s resolves the issue that the proposition raises, this

is also the case for an information state s

′ ⊆ s (Ciardelli et al., 2018).

Illustrating these concepts will prove to be very insightful, hence I will present some

examples here. Consider the following two sentences, in which ↑ and ↓ indicate

rising and falling intonation patterns, respectively.

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It seems like there are some cases in which of can not be omitted from similar constructions.

Consider the sentence ’Zij vertelde mij wie of dat er gebeld had’ (‘She told me who called’). In

this sentence, it is not grammatically correct to omit of from the sentence. Rather, this is only

allowed for dat, or its combination with of. Note that this type of sentence, containing wie of dat

er, is very rare in present-day Dutch: this construction was not present in the large CHN.

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