This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic account(Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch,whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards astratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between thebase dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading todiaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent historyof Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top tobottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization.Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflecton the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries andoutline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and NetherlandicDutch.

In English, auxiliaries form a cohesive category—unlike main verbs, they all raise to T. In Danish, it is not so obvious that auxiliaries form such a unified category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then to C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. Therefore, determining the position of a verbal element in the extended verbal projection is a challenging task. We examine the Danish verbal element g⊘re ‘do’ that shows up when the verb phrase has been topicalized, elided, or pronominalized. Even though on the surface g⊘re might appear to be of category T or v, we argue that it is located right in the middle. We argue that it is an auxiliary, but, unlike other auxiliaries, g⊘re is defective because it only subcategorizes for vPs that are pronominal.*