Cover not available
Article published In:
Non-prototypical clefts
Edited by Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, Béatrice Lamiroy, Stefania Marzo and Ana Drobnjakovic
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 32] 2018
► pp. 21–52

The role of referential givenness in Dutch alternating presentational constructions

 | Ghent University
Presentational constructions are linguistic structures that can convey all-focus utterances with no topic constituent that serve to introduce a referentially new entity or event into the discourse. Like many other languages, Dutch has several presentational constructions, including a Prosodic Inversion Construction (PIC), a Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (SIFIC) and a Non-Prototypical Cleft Construction (NPC). This article investigates these structures as alternating presentational constructions and focuses on referential givenness as a possible factor influencing the alternation. Based on a data elicitation task, referential givenness is shown to play a role in the choice of alternant. The PIC is predominantly used with unused/inactive and accessible Mental Representations of Referents (MRRs), but it can also contain brand-new MRRs. The NPC is exclusively used with brand-new MRRs. The SIFIC is used mostly with brand-new MRRs, but it can also contain accessible MRRs, in particular in positions other than the syntactic subject. The data elicitation task yielded a number of additional Dutch linguistic structures that could also be considered presentational constructions, including a construction with a perception verb used in a weak verb-like fashion and a construction with an existential sentence combined with a coordinated canonical topic-comment clause.
Keywords: alternation, referential givenness, theticity, sentence-focus, presentational constructions, information structure, Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background and state of the art
    • 2.1What are presentational constructions?
    • 2.2Dutch presentational constructions
    • 2.3Sentential structures and presentativity: A case of encoding?
    • 2.4Alternating Dutch presentational constructions
    • 2.5Referential givenness
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Number of PCs produced
    • 4.2New PCs on the horizon
    • 4.3How are the PCs related to the referential givenness states?
    • 4.4Further observations about the SIFIC, the NPC and the existential + TC
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00015.bel
References (96)
References
Abbott, Barbara. 2000. “Presuppositions as Nonassertions.” Journal of Pragmatics 321: 1419–1437. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Abbot, Barbara. 2008. “Presuppositions and Common Ground.” Linguistics and Philosophy 311: 523–538. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing NP Antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2010. Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer. 2008. “Reference Production: Production-internal and Addressee-oriented Processes.” Language and Cognitive Processes 231: 495–527. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Atlas, David. 2005. Logic, Meaning, and Conversation : Semantical Underdeterminancy, Implicature, and Their Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barbier, Isabella. 1996. “On the Syntax of Dutch er .” In Germanic Linguistics Syntactic and Diacronic, ed. by Rosina Lippi-Green, and Joseph Salmons, 65–84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bech, Gunnar. 1952. “Über das niederländische Adverbialpronomen er ”. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague 81: 5–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennis, Hans. 1980. “Er-deletion in a Modular Grammar.” Linguistics in the Netherlands: 58–69.Google Scholar
. 1986. Gaps and Dummies. Dordrecht: ICG Printing.Google Scholar
Bentley, Delia, Francesco Maria Ciconte, and Silvio Cruschina. 2015. Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Gregory Ward. 1996. “A Crosslinguistic Study of Postposing in Discourse.” Language and Speech 391: 113–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1998. Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul and Weenink, David. 2018. Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer Program] Version 6.0.39, retrieved 3 April 2018 from [URL]
Bouma, Gosse. 2000. “Argument Realization and Dutch R-Pronouns: Solving Bech’s Problem without Movement or Deletion”. In Grammatical Interfaces in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, ed. by Ronnie Cann, Claire Grover and Philip Miller, 1–25. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2008. “Linguistic Communication and the Semantics/pragmatics Distinction.” Synthese 1651: 321–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. “Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View”. In Subject and Topic, ed. by Charles Li, 25–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Coene, Ann, and Klaas Willems. 2006. “Konstruktionelle Bedeutungen: Kritische Anmerkungen zu Adele Goldbergs Konstruktionsgrammatischer Bedeutungstheorie.” Sprachtheorie Und Germanistische Linguistik 161: 1–35.Google Scholar
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1985. “Linguistic Competence: What is it Really?” The Modern Language Review 801: xxv–xxxv. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000 [1990]. “Structural Semantics and ‘Cognitive’ Semantics.” Logos and Language: 19–42.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2007. “Construction Grammar”. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 463–508. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davidse, Kristin. 2014. “Constructionele semantiek en pragmatiek in de analyse van gekloofde zinnen.” In Patroon en argument. Een dubbelfeestbundel bij het emeritaat van William Van Belle en Joop van der Horst, ed. by Freek Van de Velde and Hans Smessaert. 593–607. Leuven: Universitaire Pers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diver, William. 1995. “Theory”. In Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory, ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava and Barbara Goldberg, 43–114. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. 1996. “Focus, Pragmatic Presupposition, and Activated Propositions.” Journal of Pragmatics 261: 475–523. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elffers, Els. 1977. “Er-verkenningen” Spektator 61: 417–422.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 2007. Information Structure: The Syntax-Discourse Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Féry, Caroline. 2008. “Information Structural Notions and the Fallacy of Invariant Correlates.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 551: 361–379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1988. “The Mechanisms of Construction Grammar.” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 141: 35–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay, and Mary Catherine O’connor. 1988. “Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The case of let alone.” Language: 501–538. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frisson, Steven. 2009. “Semantic Underspecification in Language Processing.” Language and Linguistics Compass 31: 111–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. “About Bound and Scary Books: The Processing of Book Polysemies.” Lingua 1571: 17–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. “Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 71: 219–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan, and Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. “Extending Collostructional Analysis: A Corpus-based Perspective on Alternations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 91: 97–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grondelaers, Stefan. 2000. De distributie van niet-anaforisch er buiten de eerste zinplaats. (Doctoral Dissertation, KU Leuven).Google Scholar
. 2009. “Woordvolgorde in presentatieve zinnen en de theoretische basis van multifactoriële grammatica.” Nederlandse Taalkunde 141: 282–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grondelaers, Stefan, and Dirk Speelman. 2007. “A Variationist Account of Constituent Ordering in Presentative Sentences in Belgian Dutch.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 31: 161–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grondelaers, Stefan, Marc Brysbaert, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts. 2002. “ Er als accessibility marker: on- en offline evidentie voor een procedurele duiding van presentatieve zinnen.” Gramma/TTT 91: 1–22.Google Scholar
Grondelaers, Stefan, Dirk Speelman, Denis Drieghe, Marc Brysbaert, and Dirk Geeraerts. 2009. “Introducing a New Entity into Discourse: Comprehension and Production Evidence for the Status of Dutch Er ‘there’ as a Higher-Level Expectancy Monitor.” Acta Psychologica 1301: 153–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K. 1988 [1974]. The Role of Topic and Comment in Linguistic Theory. New York: Garland Publishing Company.Google Scholar
1999. “Topic, Focus, and the Grammar-Pragmatics Interface.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 61: 1–16.Google Scholar
2003. “Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar?” Journal of Cognitive Science 41: 177–199.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., and Thorstein Fretheim. 2004. “Topic and Focus.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Lawrence Horn, and Gregory Ward, 175–196. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski. 1993. “Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse.” Language 691:274–307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haberland, Hartmut. 1994. “Thetic/Categorical distinction”. In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 91, ed. by Ronald E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 4605–4606. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Haeseryn, Walter, Kirstin Romijn, Guido Geerts, Jaap de Rooij and Maarten Cornelis van den Toorn. 1997. Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst. Groningen/Deurne: Martinus Nijhoff uitgevers/Wolters Plantyn.Google Scholar
Hetzron, Robert. 1975. “The Presentative Movement or Why the Ideal Word Order is VSOP”. In Word order and Word Order Change, ed. by Charles Li, 345–388. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena. 2016. “French il y a Clefts, Existential Sentences and the Focus-Marking Hypothesis.” Journal of French Language Studies 271: 405–430. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena, Stefania Marzo, Karen Lahousse, and Daniela Gugliemo. 2018. “There’s more to Italian c’è Clefts than Expressing All-focus.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 29 (2): 57–86.Google Scholar
Kirsner, Robert S. 1979. The Problem of Presentative Sentences In Modern Dutch. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Kraak, Albert. 1966. Negatieve zinnen. Amsterdam: W. de Haan.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2008. “Basic Notions of Information Structure.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 551: 243–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuno, Susumu. 1972. “Functional Sentence Perspective: a Case Study from Japanese and English.” Linguistic Inquiry 31: 269–320.Google Scholar
Kuroda, Sige-Yuki. 1972. “The Categorical and the Thetic Judgment. Evidence from Japanese syntax.” Foundations of language 91: 153–185.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1987. “Sentence Focus, Information Structure, and the Thetic-Categorical Distinction.” Berkeley Linguistics Society 131: 366–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000a. “When Subjects Behave Like Objects.” Studies in Language 241: 611–682. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000b. “Prédication Seconde et Structure Informationelle: la relative de perception come construction présentative.” Langue Française 1271: 49–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2001. “A Framework for the Analysis of Cleft Constructions.” Linguistics 391: 463–516. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud, and Maria Polinsky. 1997. “Typological Variation in Sentence-Focus Constructions.” Cls 331: 189–206.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald. 2007. “Cognitive Grammar.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 421–462. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leino, Jaakko. 2013. “Information Structure”. In The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale, 329–345. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marty, Anton. 1918. Gesammelte Schriften. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag.Google Scholar
Matić, Dejan. 2003. Topics, Presuppositions, and Theticity: An Empirical Study of Verb-Subject Clauses. (Doctoral Dissertation, Universität zu Köln).Google Scholar
Matić, Dejan, and Daniel Wedgwood. 2013. “The Meanings of Focus: The Significance of an Interpretation-Based Category in Cross-Linguistic Analysis.” Journal of Linguistics 491: 127–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nuyts, Jan. 2007. “Cognitive Linguistics and Functional Linguistics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. 543–565. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1992. “The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status.” Discourse Description: Diverse Analyses of a Fund Raising Text: 295–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosengren, Inger. 1997. “The Thetic / Categorical Distinction Revisited Once More.” Linguistics 351: 439–479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1987. “The Thetic / Categorical Distinction Revisited.” Linguistics 251: 511–580. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. “‘Theticity’ and VS Order: a Case Study.” In Verb-subject order and theticity in European languages, ed. by Yaron Matras and Hans-Jürgen Sasse, 3–31. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.Google Scholar
. 2006. “Theticity” In Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe, ed. by Giuliano Bernini and Marcia L. Schwartz, 255–308. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schermer-Vermeer, Ina. 1980. “De verantwoording van de relatie tussen pseudocleft-zinnen en hun niet-gekloofde pendanten, en de plaats daarvan in de taalbeschrijving.” Spektator 91: 191–207.Google Scholar
. 1985. “De onthullende status van er in de generatieve grammatica.” Spektator 151: 65–84.Google Scholar
. 1987. “ Er in de ANS.” Forum der Letteren: 120–125.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deidre Wilson. 1986. Relevance : Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. “Presuppositions.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 21: 447–457. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1999. Context and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. “Common Ground.” Linguistics and Philosophy 251: 701–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John. 2012. The Mental Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ulrich, Miorita. 1985. Thetisch Und Kategorisch: Funktionen Der Anordnung Von Satzkonstituenten : Am Beispiel Des Rumänischen Und Anderer Sprachen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Van den Toorn, Maarten Cornelis. 1976. “Gekloofde zinnen en NC’s.” Tabu 71: 18–20.Google Scholar
Van der Beek, Leonoor. 2003. “The Dutch It-cleft Constructions.” In Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference University, ed. by Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, 23–42. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
. 2005. Topics in Corpus-based Dutch Syntax. Groningen: Grodil.Google Scholar
Vandeweghe, Willy. 2004. “Presentatief ER en de definitie van ‘Subject’.” In Taeldeman, Man Van Taal, Schatbewaarder Van De Taal, ed. by Johan De Caluwe, Georges De Schutter, Magdalena Devos, and Jacques Van Keymeulen, 1019–1027. Gent: Academia Press.Google Scholar
Van Zonneveld, Ronaldus Marcus. 1975. “Over (pseudo-) gekloofde zinnen.” Tabu 1–2: 1–8.Google Scholar
Venier, Federica. 2002. La presentatività. Sulle tracce di una nozione. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
Vismans, Roel. 1997. “Alfa en omega: de eerste en laatste zinsplaats in het Nederlands in vergelijking met het Engels.” Colloquium Neerlandicum 131: 393–405.Google Scholar
Willems, Dominique, and Claire Blanche-Benveniste. 2014. “A Constructional Corpus-based Approach of ‘Weak’ Verbs in French.” In Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar, ed. by Hans Boas and Francisco Gonzálvez-García, 113–138. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Willems, Klaas, and Ann Coene. 2006. “Satzmuster Und Die Konstruktionalität Der Verbbedeutung. Überlegungen Zum Verhältnis Von Konstruktionsgrammatik Und Valenztheorie.” Sprachwissenschaft 311: 237–272.Google Scholar
Zlatev, Jordan. 2007. “Spatial Semantics” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 318–350. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 2011. “From Cognitive to Integral Linguistics and Back Again.” Intellectica 561: 125–147.Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Belligh, Thomas, Ludovic De Cuypere & Claudia Crocco
2023. Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures 58:2 ► pp. 246 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas & Claudia Crocco
2022. Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?. Linguistics 60:4 ► pp. 1241 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas & Klaas Willems
2022. Epistemological challenges in the study of alternating constructions. Lingua 280 ► pp. 103425 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas
2020. Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Studies in Language 44:4 ► pp. 831 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas
2020. Are theticity and sentence-focus encoded grammatical categories of Dutch?. In Thetics and Categoricals [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 262], ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
De Vaere, Hilde, Julia Kolkmann & Thomas Belligh
2020. Allostructions revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 170 ► pp. 96 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. The Ditransitive Alternation in Present-Day German [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 6], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.