3 research outputs found
Between VP Adjuncts and Second Pole in Dutch. A corpus based survey regarding the complements between VP adjuncts and second pole in Dutch.
In Dutch, verbs are situated at fixed places in the sentence. Those places are called the first and
second pole. VP adjuncts seem to function as some kind of pivot place in between these poles.
This article investigates, by means of corpus research in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN),
which elements are intervening between these VP adjuncts and the second pole. Attention is
particularly paid to the reasons and principles that make elements end up between VP adjuncts
and second pole. First of all, these elements will often be syntactically and semantically linked
to the main verb. Secondly, the functional sentence perspective will be important for the placement
of elements before or behind the VP adjuncts. The results will show that the functional
sentence perspective is one of the main information dividing principles in Dutch sentences. The
functional sentence perspective is then implemented in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,
extending Van Eynde’s theory about Argument Realization in Dutch. Being able to handle
focus information in an adequate way is important for contemporary issues such as coreference
resolution. A better understanding of the principles that order the complements of the Dutch
verb will also be helpful in correctly analyzing and parsing Dutch sentences