Starting a Sentence in Dutch

A corpus study of subject- and object-fronting

The work presented here was carried out as part of the project Conflicts in Interpretation, in the
framework of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO Cognition Programme,
grant number 051-02-071, principal investigators Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop and Henriëtte de
Swart.

The work presented here was carried out under the auspices of the School of Behavioural and
Cognitive Neuroscience and the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen of the Faculty of
Arts of the University of Groningen. Additional financial support has come from the Stichting
Nicolaas Muleriusfonds.

Groningen Dissertations in Linguistics 66

ISSN 0928-0030

©2008, G.J. Bouma

Document prepared with LATEX 2ε and typeset by pdfTEX
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 RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN

Starting a Sentence in Dutch

A corpus study of subject- and object-fronting

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van het doctoraat in de

Letteren
aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
op gezag van de
Rector Magnificus, dr. F. Zwarts,
in het openbaar te verdedigen op
donderdag 21 februari 2008
om 16.15 uur

door

Gerlof Johannes Bouma

geboren op 20 juni 1979
te Bedum
Promotores:
Prof.dr. P. Hendriks
Prof.dr. J. Hoeksema
Prof.dr. H.E. de Swart

Beoordelingscommissie:
Dr. D.I. Beaver
Prof.dr. E. Engdahl
Prof.dr.ir. J. Nerbonne
Acknowledgments

I am first and foremost indebted to my direct supervisor, or should I say: Doktormutter,

Petra Hendriks. Petra, your continuing patience – even when progress was perhaps not
as it should – and the occasional well-needed impatience, your advice on writing and
matters linguistic, and the overall freedom you have given me to follow my own path have
been essential in the last five years. Moreover, I am extremely pleased that, last minute,
we were able to strike you from the list of co-promotores, and add you as a promotor.
As an aside, this move has put you at the top of the list of names on the facing page – a
position you deserve not only because of alphabetical order. I am very grateful as well to
my promotores-from-the-start, Jack Hoeksema and Henriëtte de Swart, for contributing
with much more than just their ius promovendi. I greatly appreciate the fact that I could
always come to you for discussion, advice, and comments on papers; and, more recently,
the elaborate feedback on dissertation drafts. Henriëtte, thank you for sending me back
to my writing desk when you did. In the line-up of supervisors, I should also mention
my almost-namesake Gosse Bouma, who has in many ways acted as a supervisor, and
who has, amongst other things, given valuable comments on one of the final drafts of this
thesis.
I thank my fellow members of the NWO Cognition project Conflicts in Interpretation
Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, Irene Krämer, Henriëtte de Swart and Joost Zwarts. I may
not have always enjoyed the vergaderingen, but I certainly did enjoy the collaborations
that were part of the project, and the many drinks and dinners in Groningen, Nijmegen
and Utrecht.
At the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen, there are simply too many people
to thank, and I shall only be able to mention a few of them by name. I would like to thank
my office mates over the years, (if I recall correctly) Robbert, Tamás, Francisco, Holger,
Jennifer, Tim, Jens, and Jelena, for being good company, and for all the chats, coffee, and
so on. I thank John Nerbonne and the members of the Department of Alfa-informatica for
adopting me into their great group and for providing a pleasant and stimulating working
environment. I thank all my CLCG colleagues in the different departments for allowing
me to learn about all the different aspects of linguistics. I would also like to thank the
 A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

secretaries on the 4th floor and Wyke and Anna for putting up with all of us, even during
the most stressful of times. Special thanks go to Leonoor van der Beek and Holger Hopp.
I took great pleasure in our past collaborations, and even greater pleasure in the time
spent together not working.
I thank the Department of Swedish at Gothenburg University, in particular Elisabet
Engdahl, Maia Andreasson, and Benjamin Lyngfelt, for welcoming me as a guest in
November 2004. I thank everybody at the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University
for an inspiring and lovely time in the spring of 2005. I would like to especially thank
David Beaver for making it possible for me to come to Stanford in the first place and for
introducing me to the Existentials project. It is safe to say that the topic and approach of
this dissertation would not have been the same without this visit.
In 2007, I finished up the final drafts of this dissertation whilst living in Oslo, where I
appreciated the contacts with the members of Tekstlaboratoriet, the ILN and the ILOS
at the University of Oslo. I am thankful to the ILOS for providing me with office space
over the summer. In November, I moved to Potsdam, where my current colleagues at the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam have made me feel certain that I
will enjoy working amongst and with them in the years to come.
The acknowledgments chapter in any dissertation is probably the chapter family,
friends, and colleagues of the author will want to read first. In order not to spoil the
surprise for any of these inquiring minds, I did not ask anyone else to proofread these
pages before printing. . . This need not worry the gentle reader, however, since the same
cannot be said about the rest of the book. I am grateful to Holger, Jaap, Jennifer, Laura,
and Neal for proofreading the drafts for grammar, style, and spelling: You have greatly
increased the quality of the book. Any remaining errors are of course my own and have
been introduced after proofreading.
I am very happy and honoured to have my dear friend Frank and my good colleague
and primary Southern Dutch informant Tim as my paranimf s. Thank you both for acting
as my witnesses when I defend my dissertation.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, brother and sister, and my fiancée. You may
think you did not contribute much to this dissertation, and I may not be able to clearly tell
you in which ways you did, but I am quite certain it would not have been written without
you. Lieve Oane, mem, Jaap, Jonne, en de steeds maar groeiende aanhang, liefste Kajsa,
zonder jullie niets.

gjb – Potsdam, 13 January 2008

Dit boek draag ik op aan mijn ouders.
Contents

1 Introduction · 13

2 Preverbal Behaviour · 19
2.1 Topological fields · 20
2.2 Vorfeld occupants · 23
2.2.1 Vorfeld subjects · 23
2.2.2 Topicalization · 25
2.2.3 Preposition stranding · 28
2.2.4 Non-arguments in the Vorfeld · 30
2.3 Subjecthood and Vorfeld pronouns · 31
2.4 Violations of V2 · 35
2.4.1 No elements in the Vorfeld · 36
2.4.2 Left dislocation and hanging topics · 37
2.4.3 Multiple elements in the Vorfeld · 39
2.4.4 Two left brackets · 41
2.4.5 Summary · 42
2.5 Topicalization and information structure · 42
2.5.1 Focus topicalization · 43
2.5.2 Topic topicalization · 44
2.6 Word order trends · 49
2.6.1 Canonical argument order · 50
2.6.2 Definiteness · 53
2.6.3 Grammatical complexity · 57
2.7 Conclusion · 60

3 Methods, Techniques & Material · 63

3.1 About the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands · 63
3.2 Syntactic annotation in the CGN · 65
 CONTENTS

3.2.1 Dependencies and phrases · 66

3.2.2 Multiple Dependencies · 70
3.3 Finding the Vorfeld in CGN · 73
3.4 Implementation · 76
3.5 Statistical methods · 80
3.6 Summary · 85

4 A Corpus Study of the Vorfeld · 87

4.1 Some first statistics · 88
4.1.1 Data selection · 90
4.1.2 Subjects and objects in a sentence · 93
4.2 Arguments · 95
4.2.1 Corpus results · 95
4.2.2 Summary · 102
4.3 Definiteness · 103
4.3.1 Operationalizing definiteness · 103
4.3.2 Corpus results · 106
4.3.3 Pronouns in the Vorfeld · 118
4.3.4 Summary · 120
4.4 Grammatical complexity · 122
4.4.1 Corpus results · 122
4.4.2 Locating the complexity effect · 127
4.4.3 Two tentative proposals for theoretical consequences · 130
4.4.4 Two types of Nachfeld occupation · 134
4.4.5 Summary · 136
4.5 Grammatical function, definiteness and complexity · 136
4.5.1 Model definition · 138
4.5.2 Modelling results · 140
4.5.3 Summary · 142
4.6 The presence of negation, and other modifiers · 144
4.7 Conclusion · 150

5 Word Order Freezing · 153

5.1 Introduction · 154
5.1.1 Word order freezing in Dutch · 155
5.1.2 Approaches to word order freezing · 157
5.1.3 Relation with corpus study · 161
5.2 A brief introduction to Optimality Theory · 163
5.3 A bidirectional account of word order freezing · 170
5.3.1 Word order freezing in Hindi · 170
 CONTENTS

5.3.2 Analysis · 172

5.4 Against a bidirectional account? · 177
5.4.1 Problems with a bidirectional account of freezing · 178
5.4.2 Extending unidirectional OT to model freezing · 182
5.4.3 Problems for unidirectional production models · 191
5.4.4 Summary · 195
5.5 A bidirectional account of freezing, revisited · 197
5.5.1 Ambiguity and optionality in bidirectional OT · 197
5.5.2 Wh-questions · 201
5.5.3 Information structure in frozen sentences · 207
5.5.4 Focus fronting · 216
5.5.5 Animacy, world knowledge and gender agreement · 220
5.5.6 Summary · 223
5.6 Combining variation, production, and comprehension · 224
5.6.1 Variation in strong bidirectional OT · 225
5.6.2 Symmetric bidirectionality · 230
5.6.3 Asymmetric bidirectionality · 233
5.7 Conclusion · 237

6 A Corpus Investigation into Word Order Freezing · 241

6.1 Preliminaries · 242
6.2 Relative definiteness · 245
6.2.1 Pronominal subjects and object placement · 249
6.2.2 Relative definiteness and object placement · 251
6.3 Relative animacy and object placement · 256
6.4 Negative evidence for word order freezing? · 263
6.5 Conclusions · 265

7 Conclusions · 267
7.1 Summary of main findings · 268
7.2 Directions for future work · 272

A List of Abbreviations · 275

A.1 Syntactic categories · 275
A.2 Dependencies · 276

B Examples of Vorfeld Occupants in CGN · 279

Bibliography · 285