Dutch pragmatic markers in the left periphery

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.