Spread the German new(s): using GAMMs to detect the source of a new reflexive in early modern dutch

With the introduction of a new reflexive in the Early Modern period (‘ zich ’), Dutch witnessed a remarkable shift in its pronominal system. While it has long been recognised that this shift betrays an eastern influence from its continental West-Germanic neighbour, High German, the spatio-temporal vector of this change remains elusive. It has been hypothesised that the major impetus came from either Protestant writings contributing to the Reformatory movement which was very palpable in the Low Countries, and notably in the young Dutch Republic, or from the informal spoken language of the many German-speaking immigrants settling in the Republic at the time. In this article, we adduce evidence that the eastern influence may not (only) have been realised along these vectors, but that the innovation was propelled through an emerging new medium: printed newspapers. Originating in the German-speaking area, this genre knew a rapidly growing popularity. Exploiting a new corpus of Dutch historical newspapers, we can see how newspaper articles submitted by foreign correspondents in German-speaking areas display a higher incidence of the new variant. We support our analysis by deploying Generalized Additive Mixed-Models (GAMM), a state-of-the-art statistical technique, which is eminently suited to deal with both space and time. We enrich our spatial model that has smooths for longitude and latitude, with smooths for the time variable as well.