Chapter 8. Resemanticising ‘free’ variation

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.