Abstract
Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can ‘gang up’ against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation.
About the authors
Jorrig Vogels is a Ph.D. student at Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), one of the research centres of the Tilburg School of Humanities at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. The research presented in this article is an extension of the author's MA thesis project at Radboud University Nijmegen. The author is currently working on a project on the production of referring expressions, and is interested in psycholinguistic approaches to both word order choice and choice of referential forms.
Geertje Van Bergen received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the Radboud University Nijmegen, with a dissertation on the role of animacy on different types of word order variation in Dutch language production. From February to September 2011, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), where she investigated the meaning and use of discourse markers in Dutch. Since October 2011, she holds a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the NWO-project ‘Varieties of Initial Learners in Language Acquisition’. In this project she investigates the gradual development of an L2 lexicon from the very first exposure.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
