Het interesseert me geen ene je-weet-wel – Minimaliserende strategieën in het hedendaagse Nederlandse Nederlands

Abstract

This paper focuses on minimizing strategies in present-day Netherlandic Dutch. The minimizing construction under investigation consists of (1) an element of negation (geen); (2) a predicate and (3) a minimizer, a noun that denotes a small quantity and that is used to reinforce sentential negation (e.g. geen woord begrijpen ‘to understand not a word’). First, we situate the minimizing construction in relation to other, pragmatic minimizing strategies. Then, we provide a semantic typology of the minimizers in our dataset. Moreover, we give an overview of the different strategies that are available to extend the slot of the minimizer, such as analogical and context-based extensions. This shows the productivity (in terms of lexical scope) of the minimizing construction.