Finite Comment Clauses in Dutch: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

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.

On the grammaticalization of ( ’t) schijnt ‘it seems’ as an evidential particle in colloquial Belgian Dutch1

“…Secondly, there are some prosodic differences. In line with what Schelfhout, Coppen & Oostdijk (2004: 341) state about Dutch parentheticals, (zo) schijnt het is several syllables long and tends to be set apart from the intonation pattern of the clause. ('t) Schijnt, by contrast, is monosyllabic, unstressed and prosodically integrated into the clause (cf.…”

“…In this section, we will discuss the properties of Dutch parentheticals and demonstrate that the particulizing uses of ('t) schijnt discussed in the previous sub-section should be regarded as distinct from the construction in (51). In Schelfhout, Coppen & Oostdijk (2004), a distinction is made between two types of Dutch parentheticals or "finite comment clauses". The first type, illustrated in (52), is composed of a verb of cognition followed by its subject and the second type (53) consists of a copula verb and its subject.…”

“…Fourthly, ('t) schijnt never occurs with adverbial zo while this is a structural option for Schelfhout, Coppen & Oostdijk's (2004) type 2 parentheticals, to which (zo) schijnt het belongs. At first blush, the presence of zo het schijnt in Vliegen's (2011b: 237) historical data (56) and in contemporary Dutch (57) seems to vitiate this argument.…”

Asymmetric Merge and Parataxis

“…But the notions of parataxis and hypotaxis comprise much more than coordination and subordination ( Van Es and Van Caspel 1975;Quirk et al 1999: section 13.2; Schelfhout et al 2003a). For instance, the subject-predicate relation can be viewed as an instance of hypotaxis, since it involves the unequal ranking of two phrases.…”

Les parenthétiques comme « Unités Illocutoires Associées »

“…La littérature propose essentiellement deux solutions différentes, reposant sur une conception globale de l'organisation linguistique. Une partie de la littérature retient que le lien entre la parenthétique et son ancre est un lien de nature strictement syntaxique que l'on peut caractériser par une série de transformations et d'effacements (Ross 1973, Schelfhout et al 2004, Dehé & Kavalova 2006. D'autres approches retiennent au contraire que la parenthétique et son ancre sont à considérer comme des clauses syntaxiquement indépendantes l'une de l'autre et que leur intégration sémantique découle d'un processus inférentiel qui se produit au niveau de l'interprétation de l'énoncé (Ifantidou 2001, Espinal 1991, Haegeman 1988.…”