Chapter published in:
Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries
Edited by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325] 2021
► pp. 49–74

Chapter 2
Dutch pragmatic markers in the left periphery

| Meertens Instituut
| Radboud Universiteit

This chapter explores the left periphery of Dutch utterances. Four positions hosting pragmatic markers (PMs) are distinguished: the first sentence position (P1), a position following P1 and two positions respectively preceding and following a left dislocated constituent. We hypothesize that there are correlations between these positions and pragmatic functions like discourse coherence, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. A short look is taken at asyndetic clusters of pragmatic markers in the left periphery, we also assume functional motivations for the linear ordering of PMs in the cluster. The goal of the chapter is primarily descriptive, inspired by functionally oriented frameworks, in particular Construction Grammar, Functional Discourse Grammar and Interactional Linguistics. The illustrative data are mainly taken from CGN, the corpus of spoken Dutch.

Keywords: Dutch, left periphery, pragmatic marker, pragmatic function, particle cluster
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An inventory of Dutch pragmatic markers
  • 3.Positions for PMs in the left periphery
    • 3.1A first sketch of Dutch sentence structure
    • 3.2Pragmatic markers in P1
    • 3.3Post-P1 pragmatic markers
    • 3.4PMs to the right and left of left dislocated constituents
  • 4.Functions of PMs in the left periphery
    • 4.1Functional classifications
    • 4.2PMs in P1 vs. Pre-P1
    • 4.3PMs after P1 constituents
    • 4.4PMs after left dislocated constituents
    • 4.5A short functional look at PMs in the middle field
  • 5.PM clustering in the left periphery
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.325.02van
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