Invloed van bedrijfsstrategieën op de prestaties van kleine, familiale ondernemingen

The impact of compagny stragegies on the performance of small family compagnies. Dumoulin brick and pipe factory in Langemark and Wijtschate (Belgium), c. 1922-1981. The case of the Dumoulin brick and pipe factory (c. 1922-1981) in Langemark and Wijtschate in the southern Westhoek (Belgium) can be regarded as a typical example of a small, family-owned, West Flemish company that tried to survive in a turbulent business environment. In the twentieth century, the ceramic sector was characterized by large-scale technological changes and a rearrangement of the industrial landscape. This article reconstructs and analyzes the life cycle of the Dumoulin brick and pipe factory. The use of an explicit theoretical framework and the regional focus contribute to the international historiography of small and medium-sized enterprises and family businesses, as well as to the socio-economic history of West Flanders.

The Main Germanic Dialects of Flanders

Introduction. The article reveals a complicated language situation in the Flemish region of Belgium - a progressing extinction of Germanic dialects, which are historically spread on this territory. Each dialectal group has its unique features, and the West-Flemish and Limburgish groups might have become grounds for particular languages.Methodology and sources. The methodological base consists in a complex approach, combining the comparative-historical and contrastive methods with the method of sociolinguistic interpretation. The investigation is conducted on the language material, collected from different dialectal dictionaries of Dutch, as well as from special linguistic papers on the language situation in Flanders.Results and discussion. The article represents a multiplicity of Germanic dialects, existing on the territory of modern Flanders. A short revue is given on lexical and grammatical peculiarities of four main dialectal groups, as well as on their peculiar phonetics. A special attention is, respectively, paid to the urban dialects of Antwerp, Gent, Bruges and Hasselt. There are analyzed some interferential phenomena, caused by the contact of the investigated dialects with Romanic and Germanic environment and occurring on all language levels - from phonetic to the syntactic ones. It has been suggested, that certain specific grammar forms in Flemish dialects may be result of phonetic interference. For Marols, which originally belongs to the group of Brabant dialects, the juncture between Germanic morphosyntactic structure and Roman lexis is discussed.Conclusion. For the last 20 years the percentage of persons, speaking the Germanic dialects of Flanders, has demonstrated a catastrophic decrease. Along with that, the main features of these dialects (mostly of the Brabant ones) have gone over to an intermediate language “tussentaal”, in both lexis and grammar. This language is being formed inbetween the Germanic dialects and Dutch; the latter is represented in the Flemish region by two variants – standard (common) Dutch and Belgian Dutch. The progressing decrease in the number of persons, speaking the autochthonous dialects of Flanders, is thoughtprovoking towards the exigency to fix the disappearing language variants through a strict scientific way.

Frame setters and microvariation of subject-initial Verb Second

The chapter focuses on V3 patterns in West Flemish in which a subject-initial non-inverted V2 clause is preceded by an adverbial adjunct which modifies temporal or modal coordinates of the associated clause, in apparent violation of the V2 constraint. The pattern is not available in many other varieties of Dutch, including Standard Dutch. The chapter summarizes the main distributional and interpretive properties of the initial constituent, focusing on, among other things, the fact that for its interpretation, the initial adjunct cannot be reconstructed to a clause-internal position. On the basis of the distributional and interpretive properties of the initial constituent, it is argued that these V3 patterns are in line with V2 syntax because the initial constituent is extrasentential. The chapter develops the discourse syntax for main clause external constituents and argues that the micro-variation observed can be captured by the hypothesis that there is micro-variation between Standard Dutch and West Flemish in terms of the derivation of subject-initial V2 root clauses.

Negation in Non-Standard Varieties

This chapter discusses the relevance of data from non-standard varieties to our understanding of natural language negation, and in particular, to theories which seek to model and explain natural language properties. The chapter focuses specifically on the different types of Negative Concord exhibited in non-standard Englishes, in West Flemish, and in Romance varieties, showing that in relation to Standard English, Standard Dutch, and Standard French, these non-standard languages exhibit much more intricate points of syntactic variation. The theoretical relevance of subject/non-subject asymmetries, the lexical nature of postverbal negative constituents, and intra-speaker variability in the expression of negation are discussed. The syntactic structures examined reveal that when non-standard languages serve as the main reference point in linguistic theory, this extends the hypothesis space in crucial ways, and more fruitful and revealing cross-linguistic comparisons can be made.

Over etwat, etwuk en iets : Geografie en dynamiek van het onbepaald voornaamwoord voor zaak in West-Vlaanderen

On etwat, etwuk and iets: geography and dynamics of the indefinite pronoun (for things) in West-FlandersThis paper focuses on the geography and dynamics of indefinite pronoun variants in West-Flanders (Belgium). Whereas traditional dialect data show etwat (‘something’) as being the traditional West-Flemish dialect variant, recent studies have attested a new variant in the area: etwuk. This paper addresses the questions (1) where this new dialect variant is used, (2) by whom, (3) how it relates to other variants of the indefinite pronoun and to the interrogative pronoun variants and (4) whether the grammatical context in which it occurs is of any influence. To answer these questions, we analyse 10.000 surveys collected in 2018 in 249 West-Flemish locations. Given that a sample of this size is difficult to analyse using traditional dialectological methods, we introduce generalized additive mixed-effects regression as a means of simultaneously analyzing the diatopic, diastratic and diachronic variation in these surveys (cf. Wieling et al. 2014:689). These generalized additive mixed-effects models reveal striking dynamics in the pronominal system in West-Flanders: the variant etwuk is clearly taking over the role of etwat as dialectal indefinite pronoun, with the region of the cities Ieper and Poperinge as ‘expansion tank’. The rise of the non-standard pronoun etwuk is remarkable, given that Flanders is generally marked by dialect shift and dialect levelling (usually in favour of the standard language). We will argue that the pronominal changes in West-Flanders can be interpreted as a sign of linguistic glocalisation, with etwuk as means of indexing regional identity in times of homogenizing informal language use.

A Corpus-Based Analysis of V2 Variation in West Flemish and French Flemish Dialects

This paper explores V2 variation in West Flemish and French Flemish dialects of Dutch based on an extensive corpus of authentic spoken data. After taking stock of the existing literature, we probe into the effect of region, prosodic integration, form and function of the topicalized constituent, form of the subject, and the number of constituents in the prefield on (non)inverted word order. This is the first study that carries out regression analysis on the combined impact of these variables in the entire West Flemish and French Flemish region, with additional visualization of effect sizes. The results show that noninversion is generally more widespread than originally anticipated, with unexpected higher occurrence of noninversion in continental West Flemish and lower frequencies in western West Flemish. With the exception of the variable number of constituents in the prefield, all other variables had a significant impact on word order: Clausal topicalized elements, elements that have peripheral functions, and elements that lack prosodic integration all favor noninverted word order. The form of the subject also impacted word order, but its effect is sometimes overruled by discourse considerations.

On the syntax-discourse interface of nonsententials in Mandarin

This paper aims to develop the empirical and theoretical basis for the necessity of motivating a cartographic approach (Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999) to the clausal structure of nonsententials (NSs) in Mandarin. Especially noteworthy about NSs is that they are able to encode clause type information, illocutionary force and the discourse roles speaker and hearer/addressee, though their structure is considerably reduced. Following the line of reasoning in Sigurðsson & Maling (2012) and Tsai (2015a, 2015b), I show that NSs have a fully-fledged CP structure, according to the effects exerted upon their interpretation. Adopting Haegeman’s (2014) sa*P analysis of the discourse particle in West Flemish, I argue that NSs contain a suprasentential structure, a Speech Act layer, dominating ForceP and responsible for the encoding of the speaker- hearer/addressee relation sensitive to the immediate context. Crucially, it is argued that the discourse properties surrounding NSs pertain to the articulated CP structure of NSs. The major consequence of the proposed analysis is to show that the theory of discourse is closely tied to the architecture of grammar in general, adding weight to the view that the transparent syntax-discourse mapping results from a set of functional projections layered in the CP periphery.