A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch

Grondelaers, Stefan; Speelman, Dirk

doi:10.1515/cllt.2007.010

Cited by 41 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…One explanation is that PP adjuncts expressing a concrete location provide information about the upcoming subject (Grondelaers and Speelman 2007;Grondelaers et al 2009). For example, in the context of a fishing event, a sentence starting with On the hook was .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is not likely that this high frequency is due to a function of enhancing predictions about upcoming subjects (Grondelaers et al 2009). Temporal expressions do not project predictive inferences on upcoming constituents as much as locative expressions do, and they are less restrictive as to what kinds of subjects are compatible with it than spatial locations (Grondelaers and Speelman 2007). The reason for the preference of temporal PP adjuncts for the preverbal position should thus be sought elsewhere.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The coding scheme employed is presented in Table 1. Annotation was performed by two independent 3 According to Grondelaers and Speelman (2007), existential er 'there' signals an upcoming inaccessible subject. Since inaccessible subjects are preferably postponed to a non-prominent postverbal position, this would make the presence of existential er a good predictor of subject position.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PP type also relates to the degree of accessibility or predictability of the subject constituent. Concrete locative PPs can project predictions about upcoming constituents, because many events are bound by certain locations in which they are likely to occur (Grondelaers and Speelman 2007;Grondelaers et al 2009). As a consequence, locative adjuncts are often fronted, especially when introducing unpredictable events or theme shifts (Vonk et al 1992).…”

Section: Type Of Ppmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Vogels

Bergen²

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can 'gang up' against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Type Of Ppmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Vogels

Bergen²

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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“…Erker & Guy 2012, Raymond & Brown 2012 and in areas as diverse as sociolinguistics (e.g. Grondelaers & Speelman 2007), historical linguistics (e.g. Gries & Hilpert 2010, Szmrecsanyi 2013, Wolk et al 2013) and language acquisition (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence

Klavan

Divjak

2016

Folia Linguistica

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(100-200 words)Usage-based linguistics abounds with studies that use statistical classification models to analyse either textual corpus data or behavioral experimental data. Yet, before we can draw conclusions from statistical models of empirical data that we can feed back into cognitive linguistic theory, we need to assess whether the text-based models are cognitively plausible and whether the behavior-based models are linguistically accurate. In this paper, we review four case studies that evaluate statistical classification models of richly annotated linguistic data by explicitly comparing the performance of a corpus-based model to the behavior of native speakers. The data come from four different languages (Arabic, English, Estonian, and Russian) and pertain to both lexical as well as syntactic near-synonymy. We show that behavioral evidence is needed in order to fine-tune and improve statistical models built on data from a corpus. We argue that methodological pluralism and triangulation are the keys for a cognitively realistic linguistic theory.

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English Corpus Linguistics

Szmrecsanyi

Rosseel

2020

The Handbook of English Linguistics

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A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch

Abstract: This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of constituent ordering in (Gundel 1988), and rules out any analysis which restricts the constructional meaning of presentative sentences to "introducing an indefinite subject".

Cited by 41 publications

References 15 publications

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence

English Corpus Linguistics

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