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Frequency of argument doubling signaling a topic-shift
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Argument doubling, also known as (contrastive) left-dislocation, is common in spoken Dutch, but it is unclear exactly what triggers it. Earlier proposals in the literature showed that the construction is not used for marking contrast, and suggested it is used for marking shifted topics instead. However, the results from a Spoken Dutch Corpus study...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... found that in 1225 of the 1345 cases, argument doubling occurred in the parts of the Spoken Dutch Corpus containing spontaneous spoken language production (rather than written material read aloud), specifically spontaneous commentaries including sports broadcast on radio and television, spontaneous conversations, and telephone dialogues, thus confirming that argument doubling is a spoken-language phenomenon (de Vries 2009; Stoop 2011; Veeninga et al. 2011). The frequencies of subject and object doubling, and the referent's oldness or newness in the discourse are shown in Table 1. 2 Table 1. Contingency table of argument doubling for subjects and objects, and for arguments that are discourse-new and discourse-old Expected count --- ...Context 2
... discourse topic of the preceding and following contexts was annotated for a subset of our data, to find out whether argument-doubling facilitates a topicshift, as assumed by Veeninga et al. (2011). The results are summarized in Table 2. ...Context 3
... fact, we found that the referent was discourse-new in the vast majority of cases, similar to the first discourse function of left dislocation in English, according to Prince (1998). As shown in Table 2 above, in less than 40% of the cases argument doubling induces a topic-shift, which can therefore not be a main function of argument doubling (contra Stoop 2011 andVeeninga et al. 2011). An example of topic-shift is presented in (14), where Merle becomes the topic after her introduction in an argument doubling construction. ...Citations
... Another explanation could be that the anti-subject bias of die in contexts with multiple referents, i.e., a bias toward the most recent referent, is acquired mainly through exposure to written language. Especially in spoken language, it is very common for die to refer to the preceding subject (e.g., Wets, Suijkerbuijk, den Hartog, & de Hoop, 2023), but crucially, in these contexts, the preceding subject is always the most recent referent (e.g., Peter die gaat ervoor! 'Peter THAT is giving it his all!'; Gerry is er niet? ...
Pronoun interpretation seems to be driven by structural factors, but also by factors related to meaning. In a forced-choice pronoun interpretation experiment, we compare the impact of the next-mention bias associated with transfer-of-possession-verbs on the interpretation of three Dutch pronominal forms that differ in the strength of their structural biases: reduced personal pronoun ze ‘she_reduced ’, full personal pronoun zij ‘she_full ’, and demonstrative pronoun die ‘that’. In addition to replicating the common Goal-bias associated with transfer-of-possession verbs, results show significant differences in the proportion of pronoun resolved to the preceding subject between all three pronominal forms. However, the effect of the next-mention manipulation did not differ between pronominal forms. These findings are in line with a model of pronoun interpretation that combines structural and meaning-related factors, and present particularly strong evidence against models that posit that pronoun interpretation is the mirror image of pronoun production.
