Starting a sentence in Dutch: a corpus study of subject- and object-fronting

A prominent type of word order variation in Dutch is variation in the
choice of the directly pre-verbal constituent, as in (1) below.

1) a. Ik vertel jou dat nog wel.
I tell you that prt prt
"I'll tell you later."
b. Jou vertel ik dat nog wel.
c. Dat vertel ik jou nog wel.

What causes a speaker of Dutch to front a particular constituent? In
this dissertation, this question is investigated empirically and
theoretically for subjects, direct objects and indirect objects.

Motivated by existing results on word order, a corpus study of spoken
Dutch reveals that grammatical function, NP type, and grammatical
complexity independently influence the chance a constituent is
fronted. Speakers frequently front subjects, definite NPs and
demonstrative pronouns, but not objects, indefinite NPs or personal
pronouns. A preference to place complex material
rightmost causes longer constituents to be fronted less.

For a hearer, word order variation means that the order of
constituents does not fix their interpretation. Several languages
constrain word order variation when there is not enough
information to guide hearers to the correct interpretation. In the
dissertation, it is argued that this constraint shows that a complete
understanding of word order variation must comprise speaker and
hearer perspectives. A second corpus study suggests that the
constraint is present as a trend in Dutch fronting: Speakers use the
object-initial word order less often when hearers are more likely to
misinterpret a sentence because subject and object have atypical
definiteness or animacy properties.

	Title and contents
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	Chapter 3
	Chapter 4
	Chapter 5
	Chapter 6
	Chapter 7
	Appendix
	Bibliography
	Samenvatting
	Groningen Dissertations in Linguistics (GRODIL)

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