This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

This paper argues that the use of mixed Dutch, the speech style that Flemish linguists have come to name tussentaal (literally ‘interlanguage’) and which is made up of dialect and standard features, can index meanings conventionally associated with dialect and Standard Dutch, depending on the linguistic ecology in which it occurs. Consequently, and in contrast with current explanations that attribute context-independent social meaning to tussentaal, we argue that its meaning needs to be identified relative to the unfolding interaction in particular contexts of use. Using a corpus of Flemish telecinematic discourse, we suggest that this finding calls for a renewed appreciation of tussentaal in relation to burgeoning hypotheses of destandardization.*