General introduction

Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, Belgium-Flanders, Surinam, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. With about 22 million native speakers it is one of the world's greater languages. It is taught and studied at about 250 universities around the world (www.minbuza.nl/en/you-and-netherlands/about-the-netherlands/ general-information/the-country-and-its-people.html). Furthermore, Dutch is one of the most well-studied living languages; research on it has had a major, and still continuing, impact on the development of formal linguistic theory, and it plays an important role in various other types of linguistic research. It is therefore unfortunate that there is no recent comprehensive scientifically based description of the grammar of Dutch that is accessible to a wider international audience. As a result, much information remains hidden in scientific publications: some information is embedded in theoretical discussions that are mainly of interest for and accessible to certain groups of formal linguists or that are more or less outdated in the light of more recent findings and theoretical developments, some is buried in publications with only a limited distribution, and some is simply inaccessible to large groups of readers given that it is written in Dutch. The series Syntax of Dutch (SoD) aims at filling this gap for syntax.

Main objective

The main objective of SoD is to present a synthesis of currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It gives a comprehensive overview of the relevant research on Dutch that not only presents the findings of earlier approaches to the language, but also includes the results of the formal linguistic research carried out over the last four or five decades that often cannot be found in the existing reference books. It must be emphasized, however, that SoD is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory; the reader will generally look in vain for critical assessments of theoretical proposals made to account for specific phenomena. Although SoD addresses many of the central issues of current linguistic theory, it does not provide an introduction to current linguistic theory. Readers interested in such an introduction are referred to one of the many existing introductory textbooks, or to handbooks like The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, edited by Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk, or The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, edited by Marcel den Dikken.