German and Dutch in Contrast

Abstract

evidence in the language-and-cognition debate (cf. below). Besides these affiliated fields, a particularly close ally of CL is historical-comparative linguistics. A well-established line of research on the borderline between CL and historical-comparative linguistics is the sustained trilingual comparison of German and English with Dutch. First conceived by van Haeringen (1956) in his book Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels ('Dutch between German and English'), its aim is to profile Dutch through a comparison with German and English, a configuration aptly labelled the "Germanic Sandwich" (see inter alia Ruigendijk/ van de Velde/Vismans 2012). Van Haeringen's main observation is that Dutch holds the middle between German and English, systematically and for historical reasons, in domains of the linguistic system as diverse as the relationship of orthography to phonology, the amount of foreign influence on the lexicon, the richness of nominal and verbal morphology, the productivity of nominal compounding, and the flexibility of word order. The desire to test this hypothesis against new phenomena or data, and indeed to expand it to new combinations of languages as long as Dutch remains in focus, has spawned the now well-known Germanic Sandwich conference series which began in Berlin (2005) and then moved on to