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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 44:4 (2020) ► pp.831–878

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Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface

A case study

 | Ghent University
Published online: 2 September 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.19021.bel
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background and state of the art
    • 2.1What are thetic and sentence-focus constructions?
      • 2.1.1Theticity, sentence-focus, and Construction Grammar
      • 2.1.2Theticity
      • 2.1.3Sentence-focus
    • 2.2Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions
    • 2.3Semantics and pragmatics, encoded and inferred meaning
    • 2.4Clausal constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface
    • 2.5Procedural meaning on the semantics-pragmatics interface
    • 2.6Thetic and sentence-focus constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus design and data collection
    • 3.2Selection and operationalization of the parameters
      • 3.2.1The parameters
      • 3.2.2Thetic or categorical judgment
      • 3.2.3Topic comment or all-comment
      • 3.2.4Focus construal
      • 3.2.5The kind of er
      • 3.2.6Referential givenness of the syntactic subject
    • 3.3Determining the encoded or inferred status of theticity and sentence-focus
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Results
      • 4.1.1The ubiquity of theticity and sentence-focus
      • 4.1.2Theticity and sentence-focus with an added contrastive reading
      • 4.1.3The non-thetic uses of the Dutch SIFIC: Tokens with a topic-comment structure
      • 4.1.4The non-sentence-focus uses of the SIFIC: Tokens with predicate-focus construal
      • 4.1.5Overview of the various information-structural uses
      • 4.1.6The various kinds of sentence-initial er
      • 4.1.7Referential givenness of the subject constituent
    • 4.2Implications for the semantics and pragmatics of the Dutch SIFIC
    • 4.3Implications for the study of theticity and sentence-focus
      • 4.3.1Theticity
      • 4.3.2Sentence-focus
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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