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Finite Comment Clauses in Dutch: A Corpus-based Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2004

Carla Schelfhout
Affiliation:
Radboud University, Nijmegen Radboud University, Nijmegen, Postbox 9103, 6500 HD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [C.Schelfhout@let.ru.nl]
Peter-Arno Coppen
Affiliation:
Radboud University, Nijmegen
Nelleke Oostdijk
Affiliation:
Radboud University, Nijmegen

Abstract

The present paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of the form and distribution of finite comment clauses in Dutch. More specifically, it was investigated where in the sentence such clauses can occur. For the analysis of the data, a topological descriptive model was used. While in the literature an extraction analysis has been suggested in order to account for finite comment clauses in English and German, our findings lead us to challenge this type of analysis and argue that a parenthetical analysis is to be preferred.Thanks are due to Antal van den Bosch and Hans van Halteren for their help in tagging the corpus, and to Toni Rietveld for his statistical advice.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2004 Society for Germanic Linguistics

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