Understanding PP placement in written Dutch : a corpus-based multifactorial investigation of the principal syntactic, semantic and discursive determinants

The present paper aims at refining current knowledge about the driving forces in Dutch constituent ordering of non-predicate prepositional phrases (PPs) as well as re-evaluating the common assumption in traditional Dutch reference grammars that the middle field position is the standard slot. Building on journalistic data in the Dutch Parallel Corpus, it is first shown that non-predicate PPs are significantly more often placed in postfield position (the structural position after the final verb cluster) than in middle field position (the position before the final verb cluster), which indicates t... Mehr ...