9 - Dutch as an OV/VO language

Summary

9.1 Preliminaries

A language can be characterized as a VO or an OV language based on its dominant surface word order or based on the order of elements in its hypothesized deep structure. As we saw in chapter 4, Dutch surface word order can be both VO (in finite main clauses) and OV (elsewhere), or in fact SVOV (in finite clauses with an auxiliary–verb combination). The characterization of Dutch as a VO or an OV language, therefore, is not straightforward.

Typological surveys typically characterize Dutch as an SVO language, based on the unmarked main clause word order (e.g. Čermák 1978: 99). In line with this, adpositions in Dutch are (mostly) prepositions and adjectives precede the noun, which Greenberg (1963: 77) finds to be atypical properties of SOV languages. In addition, auxiliaries do not invariably follow the main verb (not even in the OV embedded clauses), as they should in an SOV language by Greenberg’s Universal 16 (Greenberg 1963: 85). Also, Dutch has clause-initial complementizers, and embedded clauses follow the verb (even the verb in final position).