Case marking (accounts) in collapse: evidence from Early Modern Dutch egodocuments (1572-1573)

Abstract

In this study, I examine the intermediate stages of case marking systems essential for testing hypotheses about the loss of case and its syntactic effects in Dutch. Past accounts typically compare earlier Middle Dutch (1200-1350), when a transparent case system was still in use, with Modern Dutch, which has lost morphological case. Scholars have made claims about the order in which the cases disappeared in Middle Dutch and generally view the end of the 15th century as the point by which the case system had broken down. With a several hundred year gap between the Middle and Modern Dutch periods and no detailed studies chronicling the deflexion process, however, these claims remain largely untested. Using a corpus of 42,000 words comprised mainly of unpublished archival manuscripts—eyewitness accounts chronicling the terror and destruction at the start of the Eighty Years War—I consider the questions of when, how quickly and where the case system collapsed, while situating the discussion in the context of the intense dialect contact situations that prevailed over the period of many centuries in Middle and Early Modern Dutch urban centres.