Lieke Hendriks

RTG PhD student, member since 2021

Project "Diachrony of split NP / DP constructions"

In my project, I investigate split Noun Phrases (NPs). Split NPs are constructions in which it seems like one nominal constituent has been broken up into two parts. Here is an example of a split NP in Brabantic (a dialect group of Dutch):

(1) Boeken (die) heb ik een paar in de kast.
Books (those) have I a few in the cupboard
“As for books, I have a few in the cupboard.” (Brabantic Dutch)

Interestingly, Brabantic accepts sentences as in (1) but Standard Dutch varieties seem to frown upon them. So far, there is no way to explain this cross-linguistic microvariation. This is exactly what I am trying to do in my project. More specifically, the main questions I try to answer are i) how do the linguistic varieties that allow split NPs end up with the patterns currently attested, and ii) how should split NPs be analyzed? In order to figure out the answers my research questions, I conduct corpus research, collect data from Dutch dialects and investigate various syntactic frameworks to figure out the underlying structure of split NPs.

Education

Since September 2021, I have been active as a PhD student in the Research Training Group (RTG) ‘form-meaning mismatches’. My academic journey started in 2016 with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Culture at Radboud University after which I obtained a Research Master’s degree in Linguistics from Utrecht University in 2021. Ever since I first started studying linguistics, I have always had a great passion for syntax and theoretical linguistics; I love working on the tiniest linguistic puzzles and I consider drawing syntactic trees to be a hobby. My general interests in syntax concern (West-)Germanic languages, microvariation, nanosyntax, small clause formation, nominal ellipsis and discontinuous constructions. Besides syntax, I also have great interest in psycholinguistics.