Clause order and syntactic integration patterns in Dutch conditionals
Conditional clauses in Dutch can occur in sentence-initial and sentence-final position. For sentence-initial
conditionals, a number of syntactic integration patterns are available. This corpus study investigates to what extent clause order
and syntactic integration are associated with text mode (spoken, written) and register (formal, informal). Sentence-initial position of
the conditional clause is shown to be most frequent in both modes and registers, although sentence-final position is more frequent
than one would expect based on the literature, especially in written texts. The distribution of syntactic integration patterns
shows a clear difference between modes, as full integration of the conditional clause into the main clause is most frequent in
written texts, whereas the use of the resumptive element dan (‘then’) is most frequent in spoken texts.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Clause order and syntactic integration
- 2.1Three clause orders
- 2.2Three patterns of syntactic integration
- 2.3Conclusion
- 3.Data and method
- 4.Results
- 4.1Clause order in Dutch conditionals
- 4.2Syntactic integration in sentence-initial conditionals
- 4.3Conclusion
- 5.Conclusion and discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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