Abstract
Over the past more than 100 years, Afrikaans associative plural constructions – especially constructions with hulle (‘they’) and goed (‘things/stuff; good’) as right-hand components – have been studied from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, but with the main interest in their origins, and what they could tell us about the genesis of Afrikaans. One school of thought claims that they both have Germanic roots, while the other school maintains that both are creole constructions. No definitive conclusions have been reached. Moreover, there is no consensus on whether these constructions should be regarded as noun phrases, compounds, or derived words. The most recent synchronic description of the hulle construction was published in 1969, and the last synchronic description of the goed construction in 1989. In the absence of corpus data, unsubstantiated claims about these constructions abound in the literature. This article presents a synchronic, corpus-based, constructionist description of these two Afrikaans constructions. They are characterised as hybrid constructions on a scale between compounds and derivations, while some remarks on their productivity are made. Based on detailed analyses of their right- and left-hand components, the article concludes with a categorisation network of the schemas and subschemas of these constructions.
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Notes
- 1.
Standard abbreviations and conventions of the Leipzig glossing rules are used. Morpheme boundaries are demarcated with a central dot (following Bauer 2003), although the hyphen is also used sometimes in glosses to mark morpheme boundaries (e.g. pa-hulle ‘dad-3PL’).
- 2.
In the remainder of this article, all examples are from the VivA (2017) corpus collection, unless stated otherwise (as in this case).
- 3.
- 4.
Following Güldemann (2008), I use the names Cape Khoekhoe and Nama (locally known as Khoekhoegowab) as the two languages of the Khoe language family relevant to this discussion.
- 5.
Den Besten (1996, 2001), within his theoretical framework, calls these constructions determiner phrases, and not noun phrases. In the remainder of this article, except where I quote Den Besten, I will only refer to noun phrases, since the more general theoretical debate about these terms has no fundamental bearing on the discussions here.
- 6.
The kinship names oom/omie/oompie/uncle ‘uncle’ and tannie/tante/tant/ta’/ant/antie/auntie ‘aunt’ are used in Afrikaans to refer to members of your extended family (e.g. your mother’s sister), as well as older people with whom the speaker is (informally) acquainted (e.g. friends of your parents). Since it was not always clear from the immediate context what the exact relationship is, these were all categorised under “extended family”. All variants were normalised to oom and tante respectively.
- 7.
Available at www.bybel.co.za
- 8.
- 9.
Similar to English they, hulle can also be used as a generic indefinite pronoun, as in Hulle sê ′n vrou se intuïsie is betroubaar … ‘They say a woman’s intuition is reliable …’. In such a case, hulle profiles an unbounded region in the type plane similar to Fig. 1e. Since this generic sense, as well as hulle as a possessive pronoun don’t occur in the hulle construction under discussion, we don’t need to concern ourselves further with its conceptualisation.
- 10.
Constructs like ma·goete and ma·goeters should not be analysed as plural forms of ma·goed/-t, but rather as orthographic variants of goed 2, since they refer hypocoristically to only one referent.
- 11.
The same process seems to be occurring in English. Compare for instance one of the definitions for stuffs at urbandictionary.com: “When you have the stuffs, then you got the top quality, whether it be green or white, natural or man-made, the finest stuffs: That guys, he sells the real stuffs.”
- 12.
Kempen (1969) also mentions that he heard Piet-ons Piet-us ‘Piet and I/Piet and we’ in the Namaqualand area. No evidence of such a construction could be found in any of the written or spoken corpora, and are therefore not included in the table, or in the rest of the discussions.
- 13.
- 14.
Sw = semi-word.
- 15.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the many insightful conversations I had with Christo van Rensburg, who is a truly inspiring source of knowledge about Afrikaans, its genesis, and varieties. My gratitude also goes to Geert Booij and Ton van der Wouden for their comments; to Bertus van Rooy and Suléne Pilon for insightful conversations; to Jana Luther who did many searches in her corpora for me; and to Benito Trollip who diligently helped with the semantic annotations. All fallacies, however, remain mine.
This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF). Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the author, and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard.
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van Huyssteen, G.B. (2018). The Hulle and Goed Constructions in Afrikaans. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_15
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