Metonymical Subject Changes in Dutch

Metonymy cannot only shift the interpretation of a word, but also change the argument type required by a verb. Lexicologists were the first who considered this phenomenon as metonymy-based. For Dutch direct objects, this type of metonymy has been exhaustively analysed (Sweep 2012). Subjects can probably undergo the same processes (cf. Waltereit 1998; 1999). Therefore, this preliminary investigation examines subject changes in Dutch, on the basis of Van Dale’s (2005) use of the lexicological tag subjectverwisseling. After a classification and demarcation of the heterogeneous set of examples, clear instances of subject changes in Dutch are provided, different types of subject changes in Van Dale are identified, and their underlying contiguity patterns are analysed.