Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2011

This paper presents a diachronic case study of extraposition of subjects in passive clauses with a finite form of the auxiliary verb worden ‘to become’. The data are taken from a historical corpus of legal texts dating from 1250 until 1800. The study shows that subjects of passive clauses appear relatively frequently in extraposition in view of the fact that subjects in general encode highly topical participants, which are pref Read More

Modifiers and several other types of constituents can be right-extraposed across the right sentence bracket (the verbal pole) in Dutch. This article discusses what the conditions on such configurations are, how extraposed phrases can be distinguished from dislocated phrases, and how extraposition can be analyzed from a formal syntactic perspective. An extraposed phrase is part of the intonational and semantic domai Read More

Compared with the left periphery, the right periphery of Dutch sentences and clauses has received little attention. This paper presents a study in which the positional possibilities of pragmatic markers as well as their contribution to the semantics and pragmatics of the sentence/utterance are explored. The value of different frameworks (generative, constructional and multifactorial) for the explanation of right periphery pheno Read More

This article presents a corpus-based analysis of the Dutch discourse marker dus (‘so’) and its French translation equivalent donc in right peripheral position in spoken language. The working hypothesis of this study is that discourse markers in the right periphery of the utterance can be described in terms of an intersubjective paradigm, with discourse functions oriented towards the hearer. Results show that this is indeed the case, Read More