Probably everyone who takes an interest in language has one or two idiosyncratic prescriptive views (even if I as a former linguist normally try to stick to descriptivism) on what sounds good or correct. In my case, my most quirky and unpopular opinion would have to be on the Dutch tantebetjeconstructie, or “Aunt Betje construction”.
The tantebetjeconstructie
Dutch is a V2 language, which means that in a main clause, the verb always comes in the second syntactic position. Usually the subject will come before it, but if another element is fronted for emphasis, the subject will have to move after the verb, because the verb still has to come second. This is called inversion.
Ik wil weg! Weg wil ik!
I want away! Away want I!
"I want to leave!"
In a sentence with conjunction, if the subject comes first and is the same in both parts of the sentence, you can leave it out for the second part. This is possible because the subject is clear from context, and because conjunction—which must conjugate like syntactical structures—is possible for the rest of the sentence, the predicate, alone. So:
De man rent en springt.
The man runs and jumps.
"The man runs and jumps." or "The man is running and jumping."
However, say there is a sentence with conjunction where the different parts are slightly more complex and include an adverbial phrase of time, for example. You can say something like:
's Ochtends sta ik vroeg op en ga ik ook vroeg weer naar bed.
of-the morning-gen. stand I early up and go I also early again to bed.
"In the morning I get up early and go to bed early as well."
Even in English, perhaps you can tell something is amiss. The conjunction is performed only on the predicates, excluding the adverbial phrase of time (‘s ochtends, “in the morning”). That suggests the semantic interpretation of the remainder (that which is not conjoined, in this case the subject and this adverbial phrase of time) ranges over the whole sentence, in other words over both parts of the conjunction. As a result, it’s like you’re saying in the morning you go to bed early, which is likely not the intended meaning. This is the tantebetjeconstructie.
(Incidentally, the term is often mistakenly interpreted as referencing another stylistic error, a zeugma.1)
There is a complication between Dutch and English, in that the problem disappears in English when you repeat the subject: “In the morning I get up early and I go to bed early as well”. That’s because now, the conjunction takes a full sentence, which means no part from the first part needs to be semantically carried along to the second part. In other words, “in the morning” disappears from the interpretation of the second half. In Dutch, the subject ik actually is repeated in the example above. The reason that in spite of this, there’s still a problem with the interpretation in Dutch is that in this case, the inversion of the subject and verb, ga ik (“go I”) rather than ik ga (“I go”), suggests that there must have been something before these words. After all, Dutch is V2, so before the verb ga there must be something else. In this case, the only candidate is ‘s ochtends (“in the morning”), which explains why this is still a necessary interpretation even for the second half.
Since in practice, everybody will understand the intended meaning (in the example, I am not really going to bed early in the morning, but just relatively early in the day), this is generally considered a stylistic error at worst. Still, most people would recognize it as an issue.
So what’s the problem?
My contention is that something that is at the very least related to the tantebetjeconstructie occurs much more regularly than people typically recognize, and it is not semantic in nature, like the examples above, but syntactic.
For this, I first have to clarify that as in English, in Dutch too it is possible to drop the subject in the second part of the conjunction. To stick with the now-familiar example given above, that would be:
's Ochtends sta ik vroeg op en ga ook vroeg weer naar bed.
of-the morning-gen. stand I early up and go also early again to bed.
"In the morning I get up early and go to bed early as well."
The question here is: which parts are getting conjoined? For the sentence to avoid the semantic clash, it would have to be either the predicate including the adverbial phrase of time (‘s Ochtends sta vroeg op), so that only the subject can be carried along semantically to the second half, and not the adverbial phrase of time; or the full sentence (‘s Ochtends sta ik vroeg op). But syntactically speaking, conjunction has to take full syntactic groups. I won’t get into syntactic tree structure here, but the point is that you cannot simply extricate a word in the middle and conjoin only the pieces around it. So since ik occurs in the middle of ‘s Ochtends sta vroeg op, the first option for conjunction is not possible (I will come back to this briefly at the end of this post). The conjunction would have to be the full sentence; but that doesn’t work either, because the second part of the conjunction (ga ook vroeg weer naar bed) is not itself a full sentence, since it lacks a subject; and conjunction also has to take syntactically equivalent parts.
The only solution is to propose that really, the subject is there for the second half of the sentence, it’s just elided and does not get expressed. The underlying structure would be assumed to really be ik ga ook vroeg weer naar bed. That seems awkward at best, and a cop-out at worst, and it is probably for this reason that this form, too, is seen as an example of a tantebetjeconstructie on some2,3 (but notably not all!4,5,6,7,8,9,10) authoritative descriptions of the phenomenon online. I did not find any source that explicitly denies this alternative form as an example of the tantebetjeconstructie, only ones that neglect to mention it at all.
But when you think about it, in this case, neither of these objections had much to do with the semantics of the sentence. The repetition of the interpretation of in the morning did not matter, because it was not syntactically possible to do the conjunction regardless. Even if you were to leave that out of the predicate to be conjoined, the subject ik still occurs in the middle of sta vroeg op. So if that is the case, then this sort of syntactic circumstance should be a problem even if there is no semantic contradiction at the heart of it. Yet when I suggest a sentence that illustrates this, so far no Dutch speaker has shared my sense of wrongness about it. Let me give an example here, taken from a book I am currently reading:
Op dat moment glijdt naast mij een koe uit over de roosters en klapt neer
On that moment slips next-to me a cow out over the grids and slams downward
op haar uiers.
on her udders.
"At that moment, a cow slips on the grids next to me and slams down on her udders."
The two parts of the sentence are Op dat moment glijdt naast mij een koe uit over de roosters and klapt neer op haar uiers. You can see that the first part is a full sentence, and the second part is only a predicate and does not contain a subject. You could try to conjoin the predicates only, but then you would have Op dat moment glijdt naast mij uit over de roosters and klapt neer op haar uiers, and again, you would have to remove the subject een koe from the middle of the first predicate, which is generally not allowed for conjunction.
The issue is again resolved if we assume the subject is there for the second part, but elided and therefore invisible. We would then presume the underlying sentence has en zij klapt neer or en klapt zij neer. In the first case, there would be a conjunction of full sentences, and Op dat moment (“At that moment”) applies only to the first part. In the second case, the conjunction would take only the predicates, and Op dat moment would semantically range over both parts. However, if that was deemed an acceptable solution, then the form of the tantebetjeconstructie above, where the subject was not repeated after the conjunction, should have been fine as well. Yet it is still seen as a problem, at least according to online sources that talk about this structure and mention this form of it.
So in my opinion, although the concern here is syntactic rather than semantic in nature, it really is another example of the same sort of linguistic awkwardness. I call it the semi-tantebetjeconstructie: it only has the syntactic, but not the semantic element. Furthermore, in this form it is very widespread and occurs in just about every Dutch novel that I can think of. Perhaps through this blog post, I will finally find a single Dutch speaker who actually agrees with me on this, or even be able to convince someone; or alternatively, someone will be able to explain the flaw in my reasoning.
Let me finish by suggesting one potential way out of this predicament. In Dutch, syntax can be quite complicated, involving lots of movement from what is assumed to be the underlying structure of any given sentence. For example, Dutch is seen as an SOV (subject–object–verb) language, which means you would expect the object to come before the verb, as indeed it does in dependent clauses. For a main clause, which shows up in SVO order, it is assumed movement has taken place to result in this order, but somewhere in the brain, a representation of the original SOV order still exists.
Perhaps an argument could be made that conjunction takes place before some of these movement operations, such that the subject ik or de koe from the examples above does not show up in the middle of the predicate to be conjoined (sta op and glijdt naast mij uit over de roosters, respectively). That way, the conjunction would be allowed, and only later the subject would be moved somewhere into these structures. Such an analysis could explain why these sentences do not seem to trigger other native speakers’ intuitions of what is an ungrammatical sentence, although it would not explain why for me, they do.
Thank you for reading my soapboxing on this ever so slightly niche phenomenon written in a language in which it barely occurs in the first place.