Parentheticals revisited: The case of Dutchdenken

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation into the diachrony of the parenthetical uses of the mental state verb denken ‘think’ in Dutch. It reviews the literature on the emergence of parentheticals, which predominantly focuses on English. Supported by a systematic diachronic corpus study, it argues that the facts of Dutch (in particular: its word order properties, which are quite different from those in English) are not obviously in line with the most important traditional views (including the well know hypothesis that the parentheticals are the result of a reduction of the full complementing use of the relevant verbs). Instead, the data offer arguments for an alternative hypothesis: the parentheticals may originate in a combination of two main clauses, of the kind present in direct quote expressions (as in I thought: Oh no, he is doing it again).

Revisiting complement and parenthetical constructions: theory and description

“…In fact, recent research shows that even in closely related Dutch, parentheticals with limited formal variability and with schematic, speaker-related meanings (viz. counterparts to I think) most likely originated in structures of direct thought representation rather than through matrix clause reduction (Nuyts and Janssens 2019). The authors suggest that this pathway may even be extended to English in view of Old and Early Middle English showing the same range of word order variation in main and dependent clauses as Dutch throughout its history.…”