Come city, I am city: Associations with and appreciation of bare spatial predicates from youth Dutch

Abstract

A new construction is becoming popular among young Dutch speakers: instead of saying ik ga naar de stad ‘I’m going to the city’, they say ik ga stad ‘I’m going city’. We report on a questionnaire with open-ended questions and semantic differentials to investigate what associations L1 speakers have with the construction and how they appreciate it. We find that participants less familiar with the construction associate it with Straattaal ‘street language’ and evaluate it more negatively; participants more familiar with it associate it with student life and are more appreciative of it: they evaluate it as better Dutch, more acceptable, more beautiful, and hipper. We argue that bare spatial predicates are associated with a covert dynamic prestige and that increased familiarity with them is the driving force behind their diffusion in the linguistic community, in spite of negative evaluations.