Preposition Stranding in Dutch: a Case of Acceptability.

Abstract

In Dutch, the grammaticality of the syntactic phenomenon known as preposition stranding is subject to the pronominalization of nominal constituents. The present work examined the acceptability of this construction in the absence of such pronominalization, through a number of syntactic constructions, namely contrastive left dislocations and interrogative wh-phrases. Data were obtained from native speakers of Dutch, and computed via two-way mixed ANOVA analyses. The findings revealed that sentence type and subtype, and the animacy of constituents were significant predictors of the acceptability of preposition stranding in Dutch, whereas participant gender displayed non-significant main effects and limited interaction effects on the acceptability of preposition stranding. The implications of the findings suggest that other variables related to the participants might exhibit distinct degrees of acceptability and elicit higher speaker variation.