Pre- and post-verbal indefinite subjects in Dutch Presentational Constructions

This paper addresses the question whether indefinite subjects that occur pre- and post-verbally in various Dutch Presentational Constructions (henceforth: PCs) possess different traits. PCs can be defined as linguistic structures with no topic constituent that can convey all-focus utterances that serve to introduce a referentially new entity or event into the discourse universe (Lambrecht 1987, 1994, 2000, Sasse 1987, 1995, 2006, Venier 2002). Dutch has a number of PCs, among which three constructions figure prominently: the Prosodic Inversion Construction (henceforth: PIC), the Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (henceforth: SIFIC) and the Non-Prototypical Cleft (henceforth: NPC) (cf. Barbier 1996, Elffers 1977, Grondelaers 2000, Kirsner 1979, Sasse 2006, Schermer-Vermeer 1985, Vandeweghe 2004, among others). Dutch indefinite subjects can occur in the PIC, in which they occur pre-verbally and carry the main prosodic peak (indicated by pitch prominence) of the sentence, e.g. (1), and in the SIFIC, e.g. (2) and NPC, e.g. (3), in which they occur post-verbally: (1) EEN ZWAAN dreef op de vijver (Vandeweghe 2004). A SWAN floated on the pond (There was a swan floating on the pond) (2) Er zong een merel (Schermer-Vermeer 1985). There sang a blackbird (There was a blackbird singing) (3) Er is een hond die blaft (Kirsner 1979). There is a dog that barks (There is a dog barking) Apart from the fact that indefinite subjects tend to occur more often in the SIFIC and NPC (post-verbal) than in the PIC (pre-verbal) (Belligh 2016), little is known about possible qualitative differences between the pre- and post-verbal indefinite subjects in these PCs. This paper reports on a corpus-based study that is conducted to cast light on the issue. PC tokens are extracted from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (corpus of spoken Dutch) and supplemented by data collected from previous studies on PCs in spoken Dutch. The instantiations of the two types of indefinite subjects are annotated for various morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors, including: i) Nominal or pronominal form of the subject NP. ii) Activation state of the mental representation of the referent referred to by the subject NP, since activation state can differ not only among definite and “identifiable” NPs, but also among indefinite and “unidentifiable” NPs (cf. Chafe 1976, 1994, Grondelaers 2000, Grondelaers et al. 2002, 2009, pace Lambrecht 1994). iii) Partitive or quantified nature of the subject NP. iv) Animacy and agentivity of the subject NP, cf. Kirsner’s (1979) hypothesis that SIFIC and NPC favor inanimate and non-agentive subjects. The paper reports on the qualitative and quantitative findings regarding the characteristics of the two kinds of indefinite subjects (pre- and post-verbal) on the basis of the collected data. The attested differences will be linked to the meaning of the specific constructions the two kinds of subjects occur in and used to shed light on the nature of (accented) preverbal indefinite subjects in Dutch.