In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

中文翻译：

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荷兰语形态句法的民族语言变异：一个大规模的、数据驱动的视角

在本文中，我们报告了一项大规模语料库研究，旨在解决（有争议的）荷兰语的欧洲民族变体在多大程度上表现出形态句法差异的问题。我们不是依赖于手动选择形态句法变异的案例，而是首先编组大型双语平行语料库和机器翻译软件，以广泛的数据驱动方式半自动地识别荷兰语语法各个“角落”的变异位点。然后，我们测量了国家和文体分层语料库中结构替代方案的分布，以选择具有代表性的 20 个交替模式。我们发现荷兰语语法中的民族语言变异比通常假设的要普遍得多，尤其是在编辑较少的文本类型中，并且它出现在词形变化现象、词汇条件句法变化和纯词序排列中。另一个重要发现是，许多共时概率不对称的案例反映了这两个变体之间的历时差异：荷兰荷兰语在不断发生语法变化的情况下往往领先，而比利时荷兰语的语法特征保持时间稍长，甚至过时。 *