Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface
A case study
This article studies the various uses of a Dutch thetic and sentence-focus construction, viz. the Syntactic
Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (henceforth: SIFIC), e.g. Er loopt een man over straat (‘There is a
man walking across the street’). The article investigates whether theticity and sentence-focus are semantically encoded meanings
of the SIFIC or pragmatically inferred senses. SIFIC tokens (N = 750) were extracted from the Dutch SoNaR Corpus
and annotated for five factors. The analysis shows that the SIFIC can have information-structural uses that are diametrically
opposed to theticity and sentence-focus, i.e. topic-comment structure, predicate-focus articulation and categorical judgment. It
is argued that theticity and sentence-focus can therefore not be regarded as the encoded semantics of the SIFIC, but should rather
be analyzed as default senses of the construction. Based on similar cross-linguistic findings the article takes issue with the
assumption that most languages have dedicated thetic and sentence-focus constructions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background and state of the art
- 2.1What are thetic and sentence-focus constructions?
- 2.1.1Theticity, sentence-focus, and Construction Grammar
- 2.1.2Theticity
- 2.1.3Sentence-focus
- 2.2Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions
- 2.3Semantics and pragmatics, encoded and inferred meaning
- 2.4Clausal constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface
- 2.5Procedural meaning on the semantics-pragmatics interface
- 2.6Thetic and sentence-focus constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Corpus design and data collection
- 3.2Selection and operationalization of the parameters
- 3.2.1The parameters
- 3.2.2Thetic or categorical judgment
- 3.2.3Topic comment or all-comment
- 3.2.4Focus construal
- 3.2.5The kind of er
- 3.2.6Referential givenness of the syntactic subject
- 3.3Determining the encoded or inferred status of theticity and sentence-focus
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Results
- 4.1.1The ubiquity of theticity and sentence-focus
- 4.1.2Theticity and sentence-focus with an added contrastive reading
- 4.1.3The non-thetic uses of the Dutch SIFIC: Tokens with a topic-comment structure
- 4.1.4The non-sentence-focus uses of the SIFIC: Tokens with predicate-focus construal
- 4.1.5Overview of the various information-structural uses
- 4.1.6The various kinds of sentence-initial er
- 4.1.7Referential givenness of the subject constituent
- 4.2Implications for the semantics and pragmatics of the Dutch SIFIC
- 4.3Implications for the study of theticity and sentence-focus
- 4.3.1Theticity
- 4.3.2Sentence-focus
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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