naastwoorden

Naastwoorden is a Dutch term used in linguistics to refer to words that occur immediately adjacent to another word in a sentence. The precise meaning varies by field, but it is often used to discuss context and word-order relationships around a target word.

In syntactic descriptions, naastwoorden describe the words that sit directly to the left or right of a noun (or other content word) and influence its interpretation or grammatical role. They include determiners (de, het, een), adjectives (groene, grote), possessives (mijn, jouw), numerals (twee, drie), and prepositions in phrases where a neighboring word governs the phrase (in de hoek, naar huis). They help learners understand how noun phrases are formed in Dutch and how agreement and article use are determined by neighboring words.

In corpus linguistics and natural language processing, naastwoorden are used to model local context, such as in n-gram experiments and collocation discovery. They are essential for word-sense disambiguation and for predicting the next word in a sequence.

Limitations: the term is not a universal label in all grammars; in some frameworks, naastwoorden would simply be described as adjacent words or context words rather than a formal category.

Related topics include word order, noun phrase, collocation, context window, determiners, and adjectives.