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This paper introduces three articles which each highlight a specific aspect of Dirk Geeraerts’ research in the field of Dutch linguistics. At the same time, some general observations are made regarding Geeraerts’ theoretical, methodological, and organizational contribution to linguistics.

This paper focuses on the variable placement of the particle of particle verb constructions in Dutch and German. In particular, the option to place the particle in first sentence position is studied in a judgment task. We asked native speakers of Dutch to judge utterances which differ with respect to the semantic transparency of the particle and with respect to the distance between particle and verb. In spite of an overall awkwardness of constructions with a fronted particle, the factors under investigation turned out to influence their well-formedness. Our observations thus raise some questions about the acceptability and the grammaticality status of such dubious structures. When comparing our results to those found by Trotzke et al. (2015), who did a similar study for German, we find that the patterns in the two languages are similar but that there are nonetheless some important differences to note. We suggest that this discrepancy has to do with the more flexible use of the first sentence position in German.

The present volume contributes 11 new studies to the flourishing field of evidentiality research, all exploring the evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Khalkha Mongolian, Spanish, Tibetan, Yurakaré), using a variety of methodologies.

In a special issue of Nederlandse Taalkunde (vol. 13(2), 2008), eight discussants commented on the so-called written language bias thesis, which claims that in literate societies, both naive language users and linguists perceive spoken language in terms of units that are in fact properties of writing: letters, words, and sentences. This thesis was discussed and defended in a lengthy book from 2006, Homo loquens en homo scribens, written by A. Kraak (1928-2005). The special issue contained a spectrum of opinions pro and contra the thesis. The present article looks back at that discussion and tries to bring it to a new level, making use of ideas brought in by Davidson (2019). That article helps to understand why opinions can be so diverse: They address different aspects of a reality that is rather complex. The idea that writing is simply the rendering of spoken language in another medium is not doing justice to this complex reality. As Davidson argues, a proper treatment of the written language bias issue is only possible in a new theoretical perspective.

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

From the moment Robert Kirsner’s book Qualitative-quantitative Analyses of Dutch and Afrikaans Grammar and Lexicon (John Benjamins, 2014) appeared, it was clear to us that this occasion should not go unnoticed in the journal Nederlandse Taalkunde/Dutch Linguistics. In this respect, there is a difference with Cognitive Linguistics, which prefers ‘richer’ (polysemic) descriptions, in which different uses of the same sign are considered as part of the linguistic knowledge of the native speaker, not as different interpretations-in-context, as the Columbia School sees it. For Columbia School researchers, language use offers the point of departure for developing hypotheses about how the system is structured, whereas generative grammar trusts intuitions and phenomena of language acquisition as providing the primary access to the object of study, being the language system.

This volume contains selected papers from the 5th ICLC, Amsterdam 1997. The papers present cognitive analyses of a variety of constructions (phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, transitivity, accusative versus dative objects, possessives, gerunds, passives, causatives, conditionals), in a variety of languages (English, German, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Fijian). Besides analyses of 'objective construal', the volume reflects the increasing interest in subjectivity (grounding and speaker involvement). It also includes, lastly, contributions on the acquisition and agrammatic loss of constructions.