The new-information focus can be placed in the sentence-initial position as a result of topicalization. Thus, in addition to the responses in the primed examples in (337), we also find utterances like (338a&b). The parentheses indicate that the presuppositional part of such responses is usually omitted; cf. Section 5.1.5.

Jansen (1981: §4.2.1) claims that focus topicalization of the type in (338) is not very common (in non-interrogative contexts), which raises the question of whether we are simply dealing with new-information focus or whether utterances such as (338) have some additional property. We tend to think that the accents in these topicalization constructions are stronger than those in the primed examples in (337), which may suggest that topicalization constructions express contrastive or restrictive focus in the sense that the proposition holds for the focused phrases to the exclusion of any other referent; cf. Section 13.3.2 for further discussion. This would be consistent with the fact that utterance (338a) expresses that in the relevant domain of discourse only Marie was sent a book by Jan: if it turns out that Jan also sent a letter to Peter and that the speaker of (338a) was aware of this, he could be accused of not being fully informative by withholding information. The same would apply to utterance (338b) if it turns out that Jan also sent cocaine to Marie.

That we are dealing with restrictive focus is also supported by the fact that it is often impossible to topicalize non-specific indefinite noun phrases, since these are typically used to introduce new information, but cannot easily be used in a contrastive or restrictive way. For instance, example (339a') shows that topicalization of the existential pronoun iemand leads to a highly marked result, and (339b') shows that topicalization of an indefinite noun phrase such as een pianist is limited to cases in which the speaker contradicts a certain presupposition on the part of the addressee: it could then be used as a correction to the question Hoe was je ontmoeting met die cellist gisteren?How was your meeting with that cellist yesterday? before answering the how-part of the question.

The negative pronoun niemandnobody, on the other hand, can be topicalized in constructions such as (340a) when the speaker wants to express that he expected to meet at least one person from the given domain of discourse in Amsterdam. Similarly, example (340b) expresses that the speaker did not expect to be able to meet all persons from the given domain of discourse in Amsterdam.

Another indication that we are not dealing with a mere new-information focus is that the topicalized phrase can be preceded by an (emphatic) focus particle like zelfseven, alleensolely, slechts/maaronly: cf. Barbiers (1995a: §3).

In the absence of more detailed information on the question of whether topicalized focus phrases indeed necessarily express more than just new information, we leave the issue for future research.

The sentence-initial position is typically occupied by an aboutness topic, a phrase referring to an entity about which the sentence as a whole provides more information. Although the three examples in (342) express the same propositions, they provide additional information about completely different topics: in (342a) the topic is the subject Jan, in (342b) the topic is the direct object de briefthe letter, and in (342c) the topic is the noun phrase Marie embedded in the complementive naar-PP. Note that the comments in (342) typically contain new information and thus also contain sentence accent (which is again placed on the constituent preceding the clause-final verbs when the whole comment consists of new information).

The new information in (342) is provided by an argument, but the examples in (343) show that it can also be an adverbial element that can be used contrastively, such as the negative adverb niet, which can be contrasted with the affirmative marker wel, or adverbs such as morgentomorrow, which can be contrasted with adverbs like vandaagtoday or nunow. For further examples, see Salverda (2000:100-1).

The aboutness topic is always part of the discourse domain, which means that it must satisfy certain criteria: (i) it must be referential, in that it refers to an entity or set of entities, and (ii) it must be specific, in that the entity or set of entities must be identifiable in the discourse domain. This implies that the aboutness topic is prototypically a proper noun, a referential personal pronoun, a definite noun phrase, a specific indefinite noun phrase, or a PP containing such a noun phrase; cf. É. Kiss (2002: §2).

Contrastive topics differ from aboutness topics in that they need not be referential or specific; the examples in (344) show that they can be non-individual-denoting elements like bare plurals, indefinite noun phrases, adverbial phrases and verbal particles; examples like (344a&b) are of course also possible with definite noun phrases (de zwaan/zwanenthe swan/swans), but this is not illustrated here. Contrastive topics are accented and followed by a brief fall in intonation on the following comment, resulting in a typical “hat” contour marked by the symbols “/” and “\”. Contrastive topic constructions convey that there is an alternative topic for which an alternative comment is valid (É. Kiss 2002: §2.7); we have made this explicit in the examples in (344) by adding the part in brackets.

The intonation pattern found in utterances such as (344) is also possible with topicalized individual-denoting elements, like the topics in (342); applying the “hat” contour to these examples leads to contrastive readings similar to those in (344). Note that Subsection F will return to examples with a particle verb, such as (344d); for a more detailed discussion of contrastive topics, see Section 13.3.2, sub II.

The distal demonstrative pronouns diethat and datthat are very common in sentence-initial position. These pronouns are used to refer to a referent in the immediately preceding context, as in example (345). We have added indices to indicate the intended interpretation of the pronoun. Topicalized demonstratives differ from the topicalized phrases discussed so far in that they need not have a contrastive accent; cf. Salverda (1982/2000) and Bouma (2008:45).

The demonstrative can be accented, in which case it receives a contrastive/restrictive focus interpretation. If it remains unstressed, it typically indicates a topic shift, i.e. a change in the aboutness topic. In this respect, distal demonstratives differ crucially from referential personal pronouns like hijhe or zijshe, which typically refer to active topics. This is illustrated in the examples in (346); that the distal demonstrative brings about a topic shift is clear from the fact that it cannot refer to the subject (the default topic) of the preceding sentence; referential pronouns are not subject to this restriction. We will not digress on topic shift here, but refer the reader to Section N18.2.3.2, sub II, for a more detailed discussion.

Note also that distal demonstrative proforms like diethat and datthat in main-clause initial position are often omitted in speech; cf. Section 11.2.2 for a discussion.

The previous subsection has shown that unstressed demonstratives can be used to indicate a topic shift and are therefore quite important for a smooth continuation of the discourse. Other topicalized elements with a similar function are connectives like daarom/dustherefore and desondanksnevertheless in (347), which are neither topical nor focal in nature, but are used to indicate the relationship between two successive sentences; cf. Salverda (1982).

This subsection discusses examples such as (344d) in Subsection C, repeated in (348), in more detail. Such examples refute the persistent claim that verbal particles cannot be topicalized (Zwart 2011:72). This is possible, however, provided that they stand in opposition to another verbal particle and thus allow a contrastive interpretation; cf. Hoeksema (1991a) and Haeseryn et al. (1997:1290ff.).

It has also been argued that topicalization of verbal particles is possible with particle verbs that are semantically transparent in the sense that the particle has a distinct meaning contribution of its own; this is shown by the acceptability contrast between the examples with the verb over hebben in (349), adapted from Haeseryn et al. (1997), The acceptability contrast is confirmed by the sentence judgment task reported by Foolen & Schoenmakers (2022).

The acceptability contrast indicates that the status of the particle in the two constructions may be quite different; while we are clearly dealing with a partially lexicalized P+V collocation in (349a), the intransitive adposition in (349b) seems to express a meaning of its own, which we also find in copular constructions such as Deze spijkers and schroeven zijn overThese screws and nails are left over. For this reason, however, it seems reasonable to consider over hebben in (349b) not as a particle verb, but as a verb taking a regular intransitive PP used as a complementive; since complementives can be contrastively focused, we correctly predict that they can occur in clause-initial position; cf. Section P35.2.1 and also Foolen & Schoenmakers (2022: §4.1).

Haeseryn et al. (1997:1290) also notes that there is a tendency for the (presumed) particle verb to stay together . Consider the examples in (350) and (351); the numbers between brackets indicate the relative rating of the four construction types in the results of Foolen & Schoenmakers’ (2022) sentence judgment task, where 1 is the highest rating and 4 is the lowest; the diacritics preceding the examples are intended to reflect the judgments found in the existing linguistic literature on comparable cases.

The ordening or the ratings in (350) and (351) is based on the plot in Figure 1, taken from the article; the difference in the order of the ratings is not discussed in the article. The (a)-examples are just the reference sentences in their unmarked order, so we will focus on the ratings of the remaining examples derived by topicalization.

What we are particularly interested in is the status of particle fronting in the two sets: in the non-transparent cases, particle fronting receives a significantly lower rating than fronting of the particle verb as a whole; in the transparent cases, on the other hand, particle fronting receives a more or less similar rating as fronting of the particle verb as a whole. This is consistent with earlier claims in the linguistic literature that particle fronting is much more difficult in the case of non-transparant particle verbs than in the case of transparent ones.

Foolen & Schoenmakers (2022:§4.1) appeals to an economy consideration to account for the relatively low rating of splitting the particle verbs in the (c)-examples: because particle verbs are lexical items/semantic units, separating them syntactically by topicalization and then relinking them semantically induces additional processing cost. This proposal may be fit for the cases in (350), in which toetakelen is indeed a lexicalized form, but less so for cases such as (351), which we argued involve compositional combinations of a verb and a complementive PP. That processing costs are not involved in the latter cases seems to be supported by the fact that the study explicitly mentions that “the interaction effect within the contrast between the two conditions that started with a particle (present perfect vs. simple past) was not significant” (p.381-2; italics are ours). Since the rating of non-transparent cases with a fronted particle verb, such as (351b), lies between the two cases with particle fronting in (351c-d), we can conclude that the relative ratings of the topicalization examples in these examples are entirely irrelevant: it seems sufficient to say that, again in accordance with the earlier literature, the set in (350) shows a clear difference in acceptability between the (b) and (c/d)-examples, while the set in (351) does not. The remainder of this subsection will outline how this difference can be explained semantico-syntactically, starting with the cases in (350).

Suppose that the participle getakeld and the particle toe form a verbal projection, which we will conveniently call VP for our present purpose; for simplicity, we will ignore a number of complications related to the direct object, which has evacuated this VP by scrambling. If so, then example (350a) looks like (352a). The perfect-tense example (350b) can be analyzed as a case of so-called VP-topicalization, which will be discussed in Subsection VIC below: the VP is placed in main-clause initial position (and triggers subject-verb inversion), which leads to the simplified structure in (352b), in which the trace t indicates the original position of the moved VP. Example (350c), on the other hand, cannot be derived by VP-topicalization given that the participle remains in clause-final position; we must be dealing with topicalization of the verbal particle, i.e. the particle toe is extracted from the VP and placed in clause-initial position, as in (352c). The simple-past example (350d) cannot be derived by VP-topicalization either, since the finite verb in (350d) is extracted from the VP in order to be placed in the second position of the clause, and it is generally assumed that VP-topicalization requires the verbal head to be VP-internal: so again it is the particle that is topicalized, as in (352d). This means that the degraded status of the examples in (350c&d) can be attributed to a single fact, viz. that verbal particles cannot be topicalized due to their lack of semantic content.

The derivation of the examples in (351) goes along the same line, but the result is different in that the structures in (353c&d) are perfectly acceptable in the right context; cf. Foolen & Schoenmakers (2022:§4.4) for a relevant discussion. This can be attributed to the fact that fronting of complementive PPs is expected, given that they do have sufficient semantic content.

The cases of topicalization discussed in the previous subsections are all functionally motivated by information-structural considerations or considerations related to the organization of discourse. However, there are many cases in which it is not so clear what the functional motivation of topicalization would be. Consider the examples in (354): it has been claimed that the locational PP in (354a) must be interpreted contrastively and thus be accented, whereas the locational PP in (354b) can be interpreted neutrally and thus pronounced without any phonetic emphasis.

This contrast between the two examples has been related to the semantic contribution of the PPs. The PP in (354a) is event-related in the sense that it is part of what is asserted: Marie has met Jan & this eventuality took place in Utrecht. This reading has the property that the omission of the locational PP is possible without affecting the truth value of the assertion. The PP in (354b), on the other hand, is not event-related, but serves to restrict the speaker’s claim; this reading has the property that the omission of the locational PP can affect the truth value of the assertion: from the fact that Els is popular in Utrecht we cannot infer that she is popular in general. The contrast between the two examples in (355) shows that the difference between the two readings is related to a difference in the location of the PP in the middle field of the clause: while the PP can easily precede the subject in (355b), this leads to a marked result in (355a) (although the latter example improves when the subject is given a contrastive accent). For a more detailed discussion, see Maienborn (2001){Maienborn, 2001 #1411>.

There is a wide range of (especially) adverbial phrases that are not directly event-related and can occur in main-clause initial positions with no or little emphasis; cf. Kooij (1978), Salverda (1982/2000) and Florijn (1992). These include at least certain restrictive temporal, modal and speaker-related adverbials. href='S'>href='peaker-'>href='oriented'>

Examples of the type in (354b) and (356) are sometimes explained by the introduction of special mechanisms. For instance, Odijk (1995: §2.1) suggests that adverbials like misschienmaybe and helaasunfortunately can be base-generated in main-clause initial position. Alternatively, in a discussion of similar German examples, Frey (2006) claims that all elements that can (optionally) precede the subject can be moved into main-clause initial position simply to satisfy the verb-second requirement; the topicalization of such elements is for purely formal reasons and thus predicted to have no effect on the information structure of the clause. Frey claims that this is confirmed by the fact that dative objects in passive and dyadic unaccusative (nom-dat) constructions can be topicalized without any particular effect; the topicalized dative phrases in the primed examples in (357) should be able to receive a neutral interpretation in terms of information structure and should not require any special phonetic prominence.

However, even though it seems to be the case that the topicalized dative objects do not need any special emphasis, the primed examples still show that they differ from sentence-initial subjects in that they are not able to take the form of the weak pronoun ʼmhim (cf. also Bouma 2008:26); this may be incompatible with Frey’s claim. Since the judgments about the contrast between the two examples in (354) are subtle anyway, we must leave it to future research to investigate further whether formal movement in Frey’s sense (i.e. movement solely for the sake of satisfying the verb-second requirement) really exists; it might be interesting, for example, to see whether Frey’s claim that the supposed cases of formal movement do not involve any form of prosodic prominence can be confirmed by a thorough phonetic investigation.

Chapter 5 has shown that there are different syntactic types of argument clauses. The main division is between finite and non-finite clauses, and the latter can be further subdivided into om + te-infinitival, te-infinitival, and bare infinitival clauses. We will discuss these (sub)types in the following subsections.

From a syntactic point of view, topicalization of adverbial clauses seems to be quite unrestricted; we illustrate this in (377) for finite adverbial clauses of various kinds.

This does not mean that anything goes. For instance, topicalization of an adverbial result clause such as (378a') is decidedly odd. We have marked this example with a dollar sign to indicate that its markedness may be non-syntactic in nature, and simply reflects the general tendency to present eventualities in the order of their actual occurrence: cf. Jan stond op en kleedde zich aanJan got up and dressed versus $Jan kleedde zich aan en stond op. Example (378b') presents another marginal case of topicalization that may be explained in a similar way.