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Wat gebeurt (er)?! Existential constructions in spoken Belgian and Surinamese Dutch

Existential 'er' ‘there’ (as in 'In de doos zit er een worm') has been called one of the most difficult variables of Dutch (cf. Van der Wouden 2009:300), mainly because its presence or absence in postverbal position is perceived as equally appropriate by speakers of Dutch. However, quantitative research has demonstrated that the individual and regional variation in its use (ANS 1997:473) can be linked to the function of 'er' as an “expectancy monitor” (cf. Grondelaers et al. 2009; Grondelaers, Speelman & Carbonez 2001). When a newly introduced participant is difficult to predict from its context, 'er' will signal this unpredictability, hence making it easier for the listener/reader to process the sentence. However, the models predicting 'er'’s presence generated in those studies rely almost exclusively on written corpus data of Belgium and the Netherlands (not Surinam) and mainly focus on the postverbal distribution of 'er'.

This paper presents an investigation into existential constructions within the spoken variants of Belgian and Surinamese Dutch. These varieties were particularly compelling for comparison as there are not only discernible sociolinguistic disparities between the areas in which they are spoken, but also notable similarities, such as their peripheral status in relation to the Netherlands and ongoing processes of endoglossic standardization observed within both varieties.

The data were gathered from two very similar, stylistically stratified spoken corpora: one with 45 hours of spoken Belgian Dutch (Ghyselen 2016) and one with 48 hours of spoken Surinamese Dutch (Ghyselen accepted). In these corpora, all active sentences with an indefinite subject and intransitive verb were manually selected, to investigate the preverbal distribution of 'er' as well. Those 1832 selected sentences were annotated on the presence or absence of existential 'er', but also on factors predicting its presence or absence, such as verbal specificity, register and the type of constituent in the first sentence slot.

The data were analysed through multivariate statistical modelling, the results of which demonstrate a clear difference in how presentative constructions in both varieties are conditioned. Firstly, existential 'er' is realised more often in Belgian Dutch than in Surinamese Dutch, which consolidates the widely held notion that the absence of existential 'er' is a typical grammatical feature of Surinamese Dutch (De Kleine 2013:846; Muysken 2017:293; Ventura 2015). Secondly, more variables are needed to generate an accurate prediction model for Belgian Dutch than for Surinamese Dutch, despite the highly comparable composition of the corpora. The conditioning of existential 'er' is also more complex in Belgian Dutch as speakers often use different variants of 'er' which are also geographically distributed, such as 'der', 'ter' and the existential adverb 'het' (cf. Vanacker 1978). Lastly, 'er'-sentences in both varieties often alternate with existential-possessive constructions (cf. Creissels 2015) (e.g. 'Je hebt hier een petanqueclub'). This construction is common in other languages like French ('il y a'), Spanish ('hay') and English ('they have') (Ocampo 1993; Langacker 1995). Speakers of Surinamese Dutch seem to opt more often for this construction than speakers of the Belgian variety. Accordingly, this study furnishes explicit grammatical evidence for the idea that Surinamese Dutch represents a distinct variety from European Dutch.