Motivaties voor volgordevariatie : een diachrone studie van werkwoordvolgorde in het Nederlands

The central theme of the dissertation is an intriguing case of word order variation within the verbal phrase in modern Standard Dutch. In the subordinate clause, verbal phrases consisting of a perfect/passive auxiliary hebben (to have), zijn (to be) or worden (to become) and a past participles both allow the word order auxiliary – past participle and past participle – auxiliary, without any clear difference in meaning or function: (1) Het is normaal dat hij ooit fouten heeft gemaakt / gemaakt heeft. It is normal that he sometimes mistakes has-AUX made-PP / made-PP has-AUX This kind of variation is absent in other Germanic languages with a clause-final verbal cluster in the subordinate clause, such as Standard High German or Afrikaans. The dissertation seeks to account for the present-day word order situation in Dutch by looking into the history of the word order of the Dutch subordinate clause. The central claim of the dissertation is that the present-day word order variation can be considered as an intermediate stage in an ongoing language change whereby the auxiliary – past participle word order variant is gradually taking over from the other variant. Next to data on the changing verb order, the dissertation provides also a wealth of quantitative data on word order changes within the subordinate clause and on the development of the perfect and the passive periphrastic verbal phrase from the thirteenth century onwards.