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

Abstract

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.

Vissen naar variatie

“…Onderzoek dat beweert voorspellingen te doen voor "het Nederlands" is typisch beperkt tot NN, zelfs wanneer het voorkeuren bevat die slechts marginaal aanvaardbaar zijn voor Vlamingen (zoals in Bouma & De Hoop 2008: 670). Van Bergen & De Swart (2010) en Vogels & Van Bergen (2017) baseren zich op een corpus van NN en BN, maar negeren gek genoeg de nationale factor in hun statistische modellering. Dat Van Bergen (2011: 53 e.v.…”

Topicality and anaphoricity in Dutch scrambling

“…Topics thus do not necessarily refer to explicitly mentioned referents in the discourse, but can sometimes be identified based on long-term shared information or world knowledge. Note also that the topicality of an element is related to, but does not depend on its grammatical position (Reinhart 1981; see also Vogels and van Bergen 2013). Although topics naturally occur in subject position, they can also occur in other positions.…”

Structures of adnominal possession in Austria’s traditional dialects: Variation and change

“…Like animacy and definiteness, accessibility is not binary but a hierarchy defined by "the ease with which the mental representation of some potential referent can be activated in or retrieved from memory'" (Bock & Warren, 1985:50). Both definiteness and animacy play a major role in constituting accessibility, since definiteness refers to the accessibility of concepts in a given context, whereas animacy accounts for the inherent accessibility of entities by virtue of their intrinsic semantic properties (see, for example, Vogels & Van Bergen, 2013). What is common for accessible expressions (i.e., entities ranked highly in the animacy hierarchy or concepts placed highly in the definiteness hierarchy) is that they are more topical; this is why there is a tendency to place them earlier in a sentence (see, for example, Givón, 1979).…”