The Distribution of Weak and Strong Object Reflexives in Dutch

Abstract

We use a syntactically annotated corpus to study the distribution of strong and weak reflexive objects in Dutch. Whereas previous work was limited to a small set of accidental reflexive verbs, we look at all transitive verbs in the corpus. We use subcategorization frames to approximate verb senses. We show that comparing the rate of pronominal usage to reflexive usage is a better predictor of strong or weak reflexive choice tendencies (giving a correlation of 33%) than considering all objects, confirming a suggestion by Haspelmath (2004). We also show that the automatic method gives results comparable to those for the semi-automatically collected data in Hendriks, Spenader, and Smits (2008).