Hun Through Space And Time A micro-diachronic study of the rapid linguistic diffusion of hun in Dutch and the role of dynamism and contrast-marking.

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2022-08-10

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en

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This thesis analyses a corpus of tweets (n = 1104) as a micro-diachronic study of the diffusion of the non-standard subject use of object pronoun hun (them) between 2011 and 2019. The hypothesis was that the diffusion can be tracked through the language-internal contrast-marking and the socially-driven self-stylisation predictors of hun. Analysis of cross tabulations showed an exodus of young people leaving Twitter after 2014, creating a schism in the data. It was shown with logistic mixed effects regression models that the paucity that this created did not influence the utility to use Twitter to determine predictors of subject-hun. This research project shows that negative contrast and dynamic self-stylisation are predictors for subject-hun.

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Faculteit der Letteren