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Thetics and Categoricals
Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 262] 2020
► pp. 33–68

Are theticity and sentence-focus encoded grammatical categories of Dutch?

| Ghent University

This article examines whether theticity and sentence-focus can be considered to be encoded grammatical categories of Dutch. After providing some background about theticity and sentence-focus, the concept ‘encoded grammatical category’ is operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics or Coserian Structural Functionalism. In order for a functional category to qualify as an encoded grammatical category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that encodes the category as a non-defeasible semantic property. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of five Dutch constructions that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that none of the previously identified Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions grammatically encode theticity and sentence-focus as their non-defeasible semantics. All Dutch constructions have uses that are categorically opposed to the categories theticity and sentence-focus. Theticity and sentence-focus are therefore no independently encoded grammatical categories of Dutch, but rather categories of discourse and (normal) language use.

Keywords: Dutch, encoded grammatical category, information structure, sentence-focus, theticity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: theticity, sentence-focus and encoded grammatical categories
    • 2.1Theticity and sentence-focus
      • 2.1.1The categories theticity and sentence-focus
      • 2.1.2Thetic and sentence-focus constructions
    • 2.2Encoded grammatical categories
      • 2.2.1Encoded grammatical categories and other linguistic categories
      • 2.2.2Identifying encoded grammatical categories of languages
    • 2.3Are theticity and sentence-focus encoded grammatical categories?
  • 3.Theticity and sentence-focus in Dutch
    • 3.1The Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions
    • 3.2The grammatically encoded status of theticity and sentence-focus in Dutch
  • 4.Assessing the status of theticity and sentence-focus in Dutch
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2The Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction
    • 4.3The Prosodic Inversion Construction
    • 4.4The existential construction
    • 4.5The non-prototypical cleft
    • 4.6The perception verb construction
    • 4.7Intermediate conclusion and possible objections
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.262.02bel
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