The present paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of the form and distribution of finite comment clauses in Dutch. More specifically, it was investigated where in the sentence such clauses can occur. For the analysis of the data, a topological descriptive model was used. While in the literature an extraction analysis has been suggested in order to account for finite comment clauses in English and German, our findings lead us to challenge this type of analysis and argue that a parenthetical analysis is to be preferred. * * Thanks are due to Antal van den Bosch and Hans van Halteren for their help in tagging the corpus, and to Toni Rietveld for his statistical advice.
A b s tra c t This paper identifies backward conjunction reductions in Dutch as a special instance of coordinated comment clauses. This approach is argued to be superior to the standard approaches within the traditional and generative framework, in that it not only refrains from theoretically suspect mechanisms as needed in the other analyses, but also gives a better explanation for the constituent behaviour and the intonation pattern o f the resulting surface structure. Moreover, it generalizes over backward conjunction reduction, gapping and ambi-ellipsis, which have been analyzed as unrelated constructions until now.
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