Understanding PP placement in written Dutch : a corpus-based multifactorial investigation of the principal syntactic, semantic and discursive determinants

The present paper aims at refining current knowledge about the driving forces in Dutch constituent ordering of non-predicate prepositional phrases (PPs) as well as re-evaluating the common assumption in traditional Dutch reference grammars that the middle field position is the standard slot. Building on journalistic data in the Dutch Parallel Corpus, it is first shown that non-predicate PPs are significantly more often placed in postfield position (the structural position after the final verb cluster) than in middle field position (the position before the final verb cluster), which indicates that the postfield position rather than the middle field position should be considered the standard slot for PPs in written Dutch. Second, a binary logistic regression model was fitted with PP placement as a function of several syntactic, semantic and discursive predictor variables. This model is able to describe, explain and predict more than 80% of the variation in the data set, leading to a much better understanding of the mechanisms underlying PP placement in written journalistic Dutch. On the basis of our findings, we furthermore propose a refined and more fine-grained version of the theoretical framework in which PP placement in Dutch is traditionally described and understood

Asymmetric syntactic patterns in German-Dutch translation : a corpus-based study of the interaction between normalisation and shining through

The present study investigates how opposing translation universals (explanatory devices) as normalisation and shining through interact with each other. More particularly, we want to find out whether it is more likely to observe instantiations of shining through or (over-)normalisation in translations of contemporary literary fiction and whether the likelihood of these three explanatory devices varies according to translation direction. On the basis of a bidirectional comparable corpus of Dutch and German literary fictional texts (1975-2010), we investigated a case of syntactic variation that exists in both languages, viz. prepositional phrase (PP) placement. In both languages, a PP can be placed either in the middle field or in the postfield, but German presents a more outspoken preference for the middle field, thus making PP placement ideal for an investigation of the interaction between shining through and (over)normalisation. The results of the analyses show that (i) there is a strong form of shining through present in Dutch texts translated from German and (ii) a strong form of normalisation in German texts translated from Dutch. These results confirm Toury’s hypothesis that a less prestigious language such as Dutch is more tolerant towards higher frequencies of linguistic features which are typical of highly prestigious source languages as German than the other way around

Een extra positie?

An extra position? The present paper discusses the VP-topicalization and the mirror effect. According to the Syntax of Dutch (Broekhuis & Corver 2016), these two tests can make a reliable, non-intuitive distinction between the postfield and the afterthought, as well as between the middle field and the postfield, which is often not noticeable in main clauses with only a finite verb. Although these tests seem valuable indeed, even to non-generative studies, there are also some limitations, and especially for prepositional phrases (PPs) which can be either placed in the middle field or in the postfield. Furthermore, this paper also aims at refining the motivations of extraposition, and more particularly extraposition of PPs. We therefore rely on empirical corpus-based research, which can fine-tune the theoretical framework of extraposition in the Syntax of Dutc