“The main reason I chose to study Dutch language and literature was that in those days it was the only way to enter the program in Theater Studies. But in the first term I discovered linguistics and that was it. I got an appointment as a student-assistant right away, which was quite an honour, and I was sold.”

“I grew up in a purely Generative framework. Even my dissertation work, which was on language change, was already at the periphery of what other people did. And then I discovered that language change could not be understood purely in terms of first language acquisition. There had been a whole debate about parameter change, where children had options A an B. Then some children chose B and this was how change occurred. For me, that could not be correct, and this made me realize that it is important to work on borderlines: it is very safe to work in an isolated framework, with its clear questions and problems, but truly new discoveries are found at borderlines.”

Fire

“From that time, my approach was to combine subdisciplines and I believe it is not a good idea to stay too closely in this safe network of people working on a particular model. I am not saying that no one should do this type of work, but for me the interesting things happen when you have a clash between several fields, and it is interesting to be there when the clash takes place. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that you have to be extremely patient to work on the development of particular theoretical notions. Maybe I am missing that talent: I like to see more fire.”

“One of the central hypotheses in my work is that the distinction between early and late acquisition has consequences for language change. It is very easy to explain to speakers of Dutch that Dutch is in between English and German in terms of inflection: English hardly has any inflection, while German has quite a bit. One of my hypotheses is that this has to do with the amount of language contact in history. All three languages are Germanic languages: in a way, they were once all the same. But apparently, English lost all these inflectional notions, whereas German is relatively conservative. This has something to do with immigration and this phenomenon of the acquisition of inflection. Because, indeed, immigration plays a large role in the history of English, whereas the German standard language could develop quite isolated, and Dutch takes a position somewhere in between.”

Icelandic

“In a broader sense, in order to see the rise of an inflectional system you will have to examine language families that are typologically totally different, in different situations. The idea is that children are very good at learning and building an inflection system. Late acquisition is a way to destroy the system, simplistically said. Given this type of argumentation, what you need is a situation in which L2 acquisition hardly plays a role, in order to understand the rise of inflection. There is evidence that it works like this. Take for example Icelandic, which looks as if nothing has changed in 1000 years; it is obviously the most conservative of the Germanic languages. And geographically, it is quite clear that it is isolated, which probably helped the language to remain in its older situation. This is a Germanic example, but there are other examples as well, and there are typological correlations that suggests that typological isolation goes together with more complex inflectional systems.”

Two kinds of researchers

“There is a distinction between two kinds of researchers.  First, there are those who follow the details of a particular program, such as Generative Grammar, and who develop the most recent notions, like Chomsky and his colleagues and students. And then there are the researchers that share the broad view behind a program, the attitude towards particular empirical problems. In this respect, probably most people here in Amsterdam are Generative Linguists. For instance, the problem of language acquisition is very central in our work, and it is very difficult not to say that this is historically related to the Generative enterprise.”

“I sometimes still work on specific theoretical details, but my focus is more on the combination of particular subfields of linguistics. For me it is important to combine theoretical problems with real empirical work on acquisition or real work on language change. And if you focus on the combination of these subfields, suddenly the last insights of a particular theoretical discussion are less important to you. We do need people who work on all these micro-theoretical details as well, but I think we should also try to combine it with other parts of the field, and not only focus on particular theoretical notions that are in fashion.”

“Take again this example of language change. We have a theoretical approach, and theoretical ideas on how inflection works, and how relevant it is for human languages; this is clearly related to Generative work and insights. However, this approach is not enough if you talk about language change. You also have to look at what actually happens in acquisition of inflection. What are the mistakes you see, how early is a specific phenomenon acquired, what mistakes do adults make, how different is this from what children do? This is guided by the theoretical questions in the beginning, but it is a different kind of research that you are doing.”

Not enough

“If you talk about language change, it suddenly turns out that it is not enough to talk about child acquisition, since children are perfect learners of an inflectional system. This would make you expect that languages are constant, but what we see in Germanic languages is a process of loss of inflection. To explain this, you have to combine theoretical notions with your ideas on acquisition. And that is when you come to think about the adults, who are not good at learning inflection, and who ‘corrupt’ the inflectional system. Then you shift to another approach: if it is really connected to demographical phenomena, you need work done by historians, because you need to know what the immigrational situation in the Netherlands was, and how it was different from England an Germany. Then it really becomes an interdisciplinary question.”

“Because of the open atmosphere in Amsterdam, it is possible to do this kind of interdisciplinary research here. For me personally, Amsterdam has a much more better atmosphere than Utrecht, although perhaps Utrecht nowadays also is different than it was when I worked there in the 80s and 90s.”

“It really is an open question to what extent is there something like a universal, language-specific, innate phenomenon. It is not so much a matter of belief, but rather an open empirical question. I think it is a good research strategy to be as precise as possible about it. But I of course see that it goes together with a sociological phenomenon: with the fact that people feel that they are part of a school. Like in language in the organization of science there is exclusion and inclusion. But if we are not able to make this question into an empirical question, it does not make sense to talk about it. At this moment, in most of cases, it turns out that you cannot decide yet, because the empirical phenomena are not decisive. So there is still a lot to do.”

Theater

“Theater is still a part of my life, in the sense that I am one of these people who goes to the theater extremely often. I am not the director nor the actor nor the singer, although as an amateur I do some of these things. It is a very important part of my life. If there would not have been linguistics in that first year, and if it would have not been the case that I was very good at it, who knows what may have happened. And who knows how interesting that would have been.”