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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2020
Edited by Elena Tribushinina and Mark Dingemanse
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 37] 2020
► pp. 119–134

Clause order and syntactic integration patterns in Dutch conditionals

| Universiteit Leiden

Conditional clauses in Dutch can occur in sentence-initial and sentence-final position. For sentence-initial conditionals, a number of syntactic integration patterns are available. This corpus study investigates to what extent clause order and syntactic integration are associated with text mode (spoken, written) and register (formal, informal). Sentence-initial position of the conditional clause is shown to be most frequent in both modes and registers, although sentence-final position is more frequent than one would expect based on the literature, especially in written texts. The distribution of syntactic integration patterns shows a clear difference between modes, as full integration of the conditional clause into the main clause is most frequent in written texts, whereas the use of the resumptive element dan (‘then’) is most frequent in spoken texts.

Keywords: conditionals, clause order, syntactic integration, corpus, Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Clause order and syntactic integration
    • 2.1Three clause orders
    • 2.2Three patterns of syntactic integration
    • 2.3Conclusion
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Clause order in Dutch conditionals
    • 4.2Syntactic integration in sentence-initial conditionals
    • 4.3Conclusion
  • 5.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 27 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00041.reu
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