This article studies the various uses of a Dutch thetic and sentence-focus construction, viz. the Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (henceforth: SIFIC), e.g. Er loopt een man over straat (‘There is a man walking across the street’). The article investigates whether theticity and sentence-focus are semantically encoded meanings of the SIFIC or pragmatically inferred senses. SIFIC tokens (N = 750) were extracted from the Dutch SoNaR Corpus and annotated for five factors. The analysis shows that the SIFIC can have information-structural uses that are diametrically opposed to theticity and sentence-focus, i.e. topic-comment structure, predicate-focus articulation and categorical judgment. It is argued that theticity and sentence-focus can therefore not be regarded as the encoded semantics of the SIFIC, but should rather be analyzed as default senses of the construction. Based on similar cross-linguistic findings the article takes issue with the assumption that most languages have dedicated thetic and sentence-focus constructions.
Presentational constructions are linguistic structures that can convey all-focus utterances with no topic constituent that serve to introduce a referentially new entity or event into the discourse. Like many other languages, Dutch has several presentational constructions, including a Prosodic Inversion Construction (PIC), a Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (SIFIC) and a Non-Prototypical Cleft Construction (NPC). This article investigates these structures as alternating presentational constructions and focuses on referential givenness as a possible factor influencing the alternation. Based on a data elicitation task, referential givenness is shown to play a role in the choice of alternant. The PIC is predominantly used with unused/inactive and accessible Mental Representations of Referents (MRRs), but it can also contain brand-new MRRs. The NPC is exclusively used with brand-new MRRs. The SIFIC is used mostly with brand-new MRRs, but it can also contain accessible MRRs, in particular in positions other than the syntactic subject. The data elicitation task yielded a number of additional Dutch linguistic structures that could also be considered presentational constructions, including a construction with a perception verb used in a weak verb-like fashion and a construction with an existential sentence combined with a coordinated canonical topic-comment clause.
An important recent innovation in Construction Grammar (CxG) has been to assume the existence of a general underspecified construction underlying two or more alternating constructions, which themselves are considered to be formally and functionally related allostructions of the general construction. Despite this novel proposal, the meaning side of the general construction has either been neglected or couched in a single-layered view of meaning that does not adequately distinguish semantics from pragmatics. Building on state-of-the-art developments at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this article proposes an account whereby the distinction between the meaning of the general construction and the meaning of the allostructions aligns with the distinction between encoded (semantic) and inferred (pragmatic) meaning. We argue in favor of an allostructional account for two grammatical alternations which have previously been treated as an epiphenomenon of two underlying independent constructions: the German ditransitive alternation and the English genitive alternation. While demonstrating the fruitfulness of an allostructional analysis for these two new cases, we also provide critical observations about the wider applicability of allostructional analyses. In particular, we argue that an allostructional analysis proves to be trivial for Lambrechtian ‘allosentences’.
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