Abstract
Abstract
While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an
exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100
tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far
from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The construction was most frequent with descending
and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e. terms with a non-kin meaning at least as prominent as
kinship use; Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm 2001: 202). These findings were explained by
pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the construction creates.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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