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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2023
Edited by Sterre Leufkens and Marco Bril
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 40] 2023
► pp. 248–262

Argument doubling with proper nouns in spoken Dutch

A corpus study

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen

Argument doubling, also known as (contrastive) left-dislocation, is common in spoken Dutch, but it is unclear exactly what triggers it. Earlier proposals in the literature showed that the construction is not used for marking contrast, and suggested it is used for marking shifted topics instead. However, the results from a Spoken Dutch Corpus study on argument doubling with proper nouns demonstrate that topic-shift does not adequately characterize the construction’s function either. Further examination of our corpus data shows that at least for proper nouns, Dutch argument doubling mostly occurs when a new referent is introduced into the discourse, but that this referent does not necessarily become the topic of the discourse. We hypothesize that argument doubling is a way of giving speakers and/or hearers some extra time to establish and/or process the new discourse referent in the discourse, regardless of whether it will become a discourse-topic after its introduction.

Keywords: spoken Dutch, left dislocation, topic-shift, proper nouns, discourse-new
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature on argument doubling in Dutch and English
  • 3.Argument doubling in the Spoken Dutch Corpus
    • 3.1Method
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00090.wet
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