Constructional renovation: The role of French legal language in the survival of the nominative-and-infinitive in Dutch

Abstract

This chapter presents a case of contact-induced “constructional renovation”, which is a new term for an under-researched phenomenon where a construction that is disappearing from a language gets revived. It offers an explanation for the current presence of the (micro)construction GEACHT WORDEN TE ‘be considered / supposed to’ in the Dutch constructicon, as a semasiologically changed remnant of a nominative and infinitive (NCI) schema which used to be instantiated much more diversely from the 17th to the 19th century. While English probably played a major role in the survival and change in meaning of another such remnant, VERONDERSTELD WORDEN TE ‘be supposed to’ (Colleman and Noël 2014), it is argued here that the entrenchment of GEACHT WORDEN TE received a boost in the 19th century through contact with legal French. Frequency evidence for its regeneration is drawn from a new historical Dutch corpus extracted from the newspaper component of the Delpher text archive, while proof for the influence of French is sought in a number of early-19th-century Dutch translations of French legal texts. Important theoretical conclusions are that the consequence of language contact for the evolution of constructicons is not limited to constructional borrowing and that genre is a determining factor in contact-induced constructional change.