Inflectional Aspects of Adjectives in the Dialects of Dutch-Speaking Belgium

Abstract

Until the very recent past the field of linguistics was characterized by, among other things, a deep mistrust and a general lack of mutual appreciation between ‘dialectologists’ on the one hand, and ‘general linguists’ on the other. It was not until the last few years that a distinct change in attitude on both sides — fortunately — became noticeable. Nowadays only a handful of linguists remain to be convinced of the fact that dialect research is meaningless unless it is placed within the framework of a general theory of language and linguistic change. At the same time, the general process of theory formation can benefit from the findings of dialect research, both monotopical and diatopical. One might indeed justifiably regard every dialect as a natural language (even less subject to stereotypification than standard languages). This being true, monotopical studies give far more interesting information for the confirmation or falsification of hypotheses on the grammars of natural languages. Up to now, TG linguists have turned — with surprisingly naive greed — to all kinds of exotic languages to set up these grammars. With regard to the relevance of diatopical studies, the reader is reminded here of the famous maxim of the first German dialectographers: ‘aus dem räumlichem Nebeneinander ein zeitliches Nacheinander’; in other words: dialects can cast a revealing light on the hows and whys of language change.

Modified version of a lecture held at the 3rd Morfologiedag, Catholic University of Louvain, March, 1978. I would like to thank Wim Zonneveld for his helpful criticism.