The semantic structuring of minimizing constructions in present-day Netherlandic Dutch

This paper examines the semantic structuring of a paradigm of 89 minimizers, i.e., nouns that reinforce sentential negation in present-day Netherlandic Dutch, such as meter ‘meter’ in voor geen meter vertrouwen ‘not to trust for a meter’. Cosine distances are computed on the basis of the predicates the minimizers combine with in a sample of 100 tokens downloaded from the Dutch Web corpus 2014 (nlTenTen14) and clustered according to the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) algorithm into nine semantic clusters. The clusters largely correspond to semantic categories such as taboo terms or units of money. This suggests that, in general, minimizers belonging to the same semantic domain are combined with a similar (core) set of predicates. Based on the shared predicates per cluster, we detect signs of analogical attraction between minimizers or, conversely, competition. Crucially, low silhouette widths enable us to identify outliers in their respective clusters, for instance, minimizing nouns that exhibit signs of context expansion, as shown by their combination with semantically non-harmonious verbs. As such, this paper provides a synchronic snapshot of the semantic processes involved in (incipient) grammaticalization of minimizing nouns and, more in general, it illustrates how distributional semantics offers a heuristic to analyze the structure of a network of comparable micro-constructions.