The fish, it’s gone! The koi, I mean. Dislocations, movements, and afterthoughts: how are they expressed in Afrikaans? How do they differ from Dutch and German?
Presented by: Luané Lennox, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
In this presentation, the left and right peripheries of Afrikaans, a West Germanic language indigenous to South Africa, will be examined. The focus of the presentation will be on the various types of constructions associated with the respective peripheries, as well as their underlying information structure and their specific roles in discourse. Afrikaans is a relatively young language, having developed from 17th century Dutch after Dutch settlers formed a colony and trading station at Cape Town in 1652 (Van Huyssteen et al., 2015; van Rensburg, 2019). Therefore, comparisons will be drawn to similar constructions in Dutch to demonstrate how the language has changed over the years yet continues to utilise equivalent constructions despite no longer having access to all the morphological processes of Dutch. The Afrikaans constructions will also be compared with relevant phenomena in German, a language of which the left and right peripheries have been well-studied. Building on the basic assumptions of the Minimalist Programme, this paper draws heavily from Rizzi’s cartographic approach to the left periphery (1997). The Afrikaans-Dutch discussion will be built on de Vries’s series of work on Dutch’s A-bar syntax as well as recent studies on the information structure of the left and right peripheries of Germanic languages (de Vries, 2007, 2009; Kalbertodt et al, 2015; Ott & de Vries, 2016).