The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

Linguistic research on a unique collection of Dutch letters allowed us to gain access to the every-day language of people from various walks of life. Private letters by men, women and even children have been elaborately explored in the Letters as Loot researchprogramme, initiated and directed by prof.…

How did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite population. This dissertation – written from a sociolinguistic point of view – gives us new insights into late-…

The Dutch prefix ge- in historical perspective gives first of all a general account of the development of the word formation processes involving ge- in which special attention is paid to the participial ge-.

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

This dissertation investigates A'-dependencies in Standard German, Zurich German and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The analysis is carried out within the Principles & Parameters framework.

More than a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters from seized ships are now available online. The letters are a gold mine for researchers wanting to study the everyday language used by men and women during this period.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

Leiden University researchers have discovered by chance a note from 1783 in Papiamento. They are working on a linguistic study on confiscated Dutch letters. The ‘Letters as loot’ project is headed by Professor Marijke van der Wal.

The Dutch phrase ‘ijs en weder dienende’ (literally, ‘ice and weather serving’) is a good example of what is known as a participle clause and is perhaps one of the most unfathomable grammatical constructions in Dutch. For what (or who) is serving whom (or what)? It actually means ‘ice and weather permitting’.…