Argument doubling with proper nouns in spoken Dutch ; A corpus study

Abstract 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 on argument doubling with proper nouns demonstrate that topic-shift does not adequately characterize the construction’s function either. Further examination of our corpus data shows that at least for proper nouns, Dutch argument doubling mos... Mehr ...