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 preferably placed in the beginning of the clause. This is explained by the fact that subjects of passive clauses encode patient participants, and are thus less topical than more prototypical subjects. Furthermore, the study shows that subjects of worden-clauses are increasingly extraposed in the investigated time period. This development is related to the fact that the grammaticalization of passive clauses is accompanied by an increased usage of sentential subjects, which are systematically placed in extraposition throughout the history of Dutch.

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 domain of the host, and the process is limited to the finite clause. Nevertheless, it can cross certain island boundaries in terms of structural hierarchy, among other things. Such properties are problematic for movement and stranding theories of extraposition. Instead, I propose an alternative analysis in terms of specifying coordination. Furthermore, I argue that ellipsis plays a role. In effect, then, extraposition amounts to structural but not phonological repetition of a part of the clause, such that the extraposed phrase is base-generated within the additional part of the structure.

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 phenomena is discussed and the findings on Dutch final pragmatic markers are compared with similar phenomena in other languages.

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, both for dus and for donc In the right periphery, the two markers express metadiscursive meanings of reformulation and explicitation, more than of causal conclusion. These meanings have been interpreted as hearer-oriented, since they either help the reader to make sense of the message (reformulation, explicitation) or they invite the hearer to co-construct the conclusive meanings (causal conclusion). In addition, both markers seem to play a specific role in turn transitions thus adding to their intersubjective character.