oa De zijnsstatus van de afhankelijke V1-constructie in het Nederlands

The ontological status of the dependent verb-first construction in Dutch

Dependent verb-first clauses have received a fair amount of interest from a functionalist perspective. In this paper, I argue that their conceived unity as a grammatical construction might be overstated. I do so on the basis of both categorical and probabilistic differences in the distributions of the various types that I discern. The shared functional properties of the various dependent verb-first clauses are best seen as non-conventional tendencies rather than as a conventional symbolic function, that may have driven the development historically, but is not a part of the inventory of linguistic knowledge of a language user synchronically.