Starting a Sentence in Dutch. A corpus study of subject - and object-fronting

Description

Optima Grafische Communicatie, 2008. - 309 p.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.