The aim of this paper is twofold. We will argue that Flemish /en/ has hitherto been misanalysed, mostly as a marker of negation or polarity, and that a number of its distributional and interpretive properties have previously been ignored. In contrast to previous analyses of this particle (Haegeman, 1998, Jayaseelan, 2010) we propose that the specific properties of /en/ that we have identified are not syntactically encoded but instead follow from its lexical semantics. Following a Relevance Theory approach, we will propose a new analysis of en as a discourse marker, arguing that it has undergone grammaticalization as a procedural item, or processing instruction, instructing discourse participants on how to integrate the utterance containing it into the discourse context
