Reineke Bok-Bennema, born in Domburg, the Netherlands, in 1946. Ph.D. from Tilburg University. Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Groningen.
Fellow (1 September 1996 – 31 January 1997)
I stayed at NIAS from the beginning of September 1996 till the end of January 1997 as a member of the theme group “An Encyclopaedia of Syntactic Case Studies”. During this period I participated in the – often time consuming, but very useful – discussions of my theme group. Furthermore, I worked on the following case studies:
Clitic Climbing
Null Arguments
Antipassive
Interrogative Inversion
The first of these studies was in an advanced stage at the end of my NIAS period, and I reported on it during the take-over meeting of the theme group at the end of the fall semester. I must say that this study cost me more time than I had foreseen. One major reason for this is that I found it particularly difficult to combine actual theoretical insights into the grammar as a whole with specific (important) proposals on the construction dating from a period in which grammatical theory was less developed. Luckily, the environment at NIAS was such that I had the opportunity to wrestle with this problem in peace as well as to discuss it with colleagues. No doubt the outcome of this process will be useful to me when writing the other studies. As for the second of these: I compiled a bibliography, and set up a course on the topic, which I taught at my department in spring. For the other two cases I did mainly bibliographical research.
The technical aspects of my project made it necessary for me to up-date my word-processing skills. I spent time on learning to use WordPerfect 6.1. and Hypertext.
Apart from my activities for the theme group, I finished a manuscript for a large article (“Romance complex words and the theory of morphology”, in collaboration with B. Kampers-Manhe), read a number of important works in my field, worked on reviews of articles, and prepared an opposition for a thesis defense.