In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno… read more
We investigate Differential Subject Marking in Nepali imperfective constructions. No previous accounts were satisfying in explaining under what conditions the ergative marker is preferably used. Building on a probabilistic approach to syntactic variability, we conducted statistical analyses on the… read more
This article presents a corpus study of the variable placement of adverbial satellites in spoken Dutch. It is widely contended that the relative order of satellites is motivated by three general principles: information status, length and the proximity principle. The proximity principle maintains… read more
De Cuypere, Ludovic, Johan van der Auwera and Klaas Willems 2007 Double negation and iconicityInsistent Images, Tabakowska, Elżbieta, Christina Ljungberg and Olga Fischer (eds.), pp. 301–320 | Article
Typological research suggests that double negation - the use of two negative markers to denote one negative meaning - is a popular strategy amongst a wide variety of languages. This paper focuses on two types of double negation. The first type, exemplified by Fr. Je ne chante pas ‘I don’t sing’,… read more