Abstract
Whether or not languages display ‘free’ variation is a moot point. In this article, we look at a near-synonymous pair in syntax, namely, V1 vs syndetic conditionals in Dutch, and argue that due to diachronic developments, Dutch has been in a situation for quite some time in which these two variants coexist. Despite this coexistence, a state in which they alternate freely is unstable: syntactic/semantic investigation shows that V1 is retreating into a specialised niche of tentativeness and counterfactuality, though the development has not advanced as far as in English, where a similar development can be witnessed. We show the subtle differences between the two types of conditionals with traditional logistic regression as well as with semantic vectors and multidimensional scaling.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company