Title: Het syntactische gedrag van het Middelnederlandse zinsinleidende doe ('toen')
Abstract: This article presents the results of a corpus-based investigation into the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the adverbial subordinator doe ‘when’ in Middle Dutch prose. Based on the interpretation of up to 16.000 sentences introduced by the polysyntactic lexeme doe, we fi rst of all show that word order is a fairly reliable formal-syntactic means to distinguish between a main clause and a subordinate clause and, as a consequence, between the adverbial and the conjunctive use of doe. Middle Dutch doe-clauses which are both syntactically and semantically independent in a text, almost always display verb second (Vf 2 ), meaning that they are also formally recognizable as a main clause. In such Vf 2 -clauses doe can be identifi ed as an adverb. On the other hand, doe-clauses which display verb late, are logically dependent of and syntactically subordinate to a matrix clause. In these formally recognizable subordinate clauses, doe can be identifi ed as an adverbial subordinator. In the second part of our article we show that adverbial doe-clauses preceding the main clause can affect the left-periphery word order in the main clause in three different ways. The dominant pattern in Middle Dutch is the resumptive construction, in which the adverbial clause is resumed in the main clause by an anaphoric element, e.g. adverbial doe. Secondly, the doe-subclause can be syntactically integrated in the main clause and is thus immediately followed by Vf in the main clause, which is the most common pattern in present Dutch. Finally, the doe-clause is not integrated in the main clause and does not seem to have any effect on the word order in the main clause, which starts with a new constituent. The use of these three types of constructions in Middle Dutch seems to be determined rather by the individual preference of the author than by stilistic, geographical or diachronic factors. 1. Probleemstelling Er bestaat een vrij grote consensus dat het begrip onderschikking in de Germaanse talen op basis van drie criteria gedefi nieerd kan worden, die al dan Het syntactische gedrag van de Middelnederlandse zinsinleidende doe (‘toen’)
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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