I don’t know how it happened that some of the recent post failed to be open for comments. Feel free to repost your comment to the appropriate entry.

Anyway, there is one thing about Hendriks’ paper that is interesting from the cultural point of view. Her paper has examples only in English and she is Dutch. Well, for me there is no problem about it because I myself have written works with only English examples.

But when someone, who is not Dutch and is not an English native speaker, writes a paper using only English examples, the reaction of the Dutch community is ‘why don’t you give us data from your own native Language?’, ‘the best contribution foreigners may give is information about their own languages, we are interested in knowing about your own language’, ‘the idea of collaborating with foreigners is precisely to know about their own languages’, etc.

So, if one applies the Dutch rules to Dutch authors themselves, one should ask mevrow Hendriks why hasn’t she written about Dutch. But, as I am not Dutch, I shall not exact it from her. Rather I reserve to myself and to other linguists the right to write about English or about anyother language, should it be his own native language or a foreign language.