Between VP Adjuncts and Second Pole in Dutch : A corpus based survey regarding the complements between VP adjuncts and second pole in Dutch

Abstract

In Dutch, verbs are situated at fixed places in the sentence. Those places are called the first and second pole. VP adjuncts seem to function as some kind of pivot place in between these poles. This article investigates, by means of corpus research in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), which elements are intervening between these VP adjuncts and the second pole. Attention is particularly paid to the reasons and principles that make elements end up between VP adjuncts and second pole. First of all, these elements will often be syntactically and semantically linked to the main verb. Secondly, the functional sentence perspective will be important for the placement of elements before or behind the VP adjuncts. The results will show that the functional sentence perspective is one of the main information dividing principles in Dutch sentences. The functional sentence perspective is then implemented in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, extending Van Eynde’s theory about Argument Realization in Dutch. Being able to handle focus information in an adequate way is important for contemporary issues such as coreference resolution. A better understanding of the principles that order the complements of the Dutch verb will also be helpful in correctly analyzing and parsing Dutch sentences.