Abstract This paper presents an investigation into the diachrony of the parenthetical uses of the mental state verb denken ‘think’ in Dutch. It reviews the literature on the emergence of parentheticals, which predominantly focuses on English. Supported by a systematic diachronic corpus study, it argues that the facts of Dutch (in particular: its word order properties, which are quite different from those in English) are not obviously in line with the most important traditional views (including the well know hypothesis that the parentheticals are the result of a reduction of the full complementing use of the relevant verbs). Instead, the data offer arguments for an alternative hypothesis: the parentheticals may originate in a combination of two main clauses, of the kind present in direct quote expressions (as in I thought: Oh no, he is doing it again).

中文翻译：

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再谈括号：荷兰登肯案

摘要本文对荷兰人的心理状态动词denken'think'的括号用法进行了调查。它回顾了有关括号出现的文献，这些文献主要集中在英语方面。它得到系统的历时性语料研究的支持，认为荷兰语的事实（尤其是其词序特性与英语完全不同）明显不符合最重要的传统观点（包括众所周知的假设）括号是相关动词完全互补使用减少的结果）。取而代之的是，数据为另一种假设提供了论点：括号可能源自两个主要子句的组合，而这两个子句都存在于直接引号表达式中（例如，我认为：哦，不，