A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch

Abstract

This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of constituent ordering in presentative er-constructions in Belgian Dutch. Whereas in the majority of these sentences, the locative typically follows the indefinite subject (cf. Er ligt een bompakket op de zesde verdieping ‘There is a bomb on the sixth floor’), in a small number the locative precedes the subject, as in Er zijn in Brussel geen getto's ‘There are in Brussels no ghettoes’. In order to account for this hitherto unnoticed variation, we extracted 360 er-initial sentences with one locative adjunct (either in final or penultimate position) from a corpus of written and spoken Dutch, and coded them for eight semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic variables. A stepwise logistic regression confirmed our hypothesis that er's inaccessibility marking function (Grondelaers, Brysbaert, Speelman and Geeraerts 2002) is a factor which determines word order variation. At the same time, however, the regression analysis demonstrated that there is a more significant ordering motivation, viz. informational prominence. The finding that it is the more prominent constituent which tends to be sentence-final throws new light on the givenbefore-new principle (Gundel 1988), and rules out any analysis which restricts the constructional meaning of presentative sentences to “introducing an indefinite subject”.