This article studies the various uses of a Dutch thetic and sentence-focus construction, viz. the Syntactic
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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.
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Belligh, Thomas, Ludovic De Cuypere & Claudia Crocco
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