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Independent conditional clauses with argumentative function in Dutch

  • Sarah D’Hertefelt

    Sarah D’Hertefelt obtained her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Leuven, and currently teaches English proficiency at the University of Brussels (VUB, Belgium). Her research interests include complementation and conditionality, insubordination and Germanic languages.

    and An Van linden

    An Van linden is Assistant Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Liège and affiliated researcher in the research unit Functional and Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her research interests include the analysis of clause combining, mood and modality, information structure and grammaticalization in the NP, from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, in the Germanic languages as well as in typologically diverse languages. She is also describing Harakmbut, an unclassified language from the Peruvian Amazon.

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From the journal Text & Talk

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of independent conditional clauses (ICCs) that are used with argumentative functions in spoken Dutch. ICCs are used as arguments when they serve to motivate the speaker’s implied standpoint regarding a preceding propositional content, termed the trigger. Two basic types of argumentative ICCs can be distinguished, which are termed “direct” and “indirect” arguments. Direct arguments express a contextually given premise on the basis of which a conclusion about the speaker’s standpoint regarding a preceding trigger can be drawn. Indirect arguments, by contrast, express a condition that – if it had held – would have warranted the conclusion, but its counterfactual interpretation resulting from hypothetical backshift signals that the speaker knows that this condition is not fulfilled, and hence that the implied standpoint regarding a trigger is not valid either. We argue that direct and indirect ICCs instantiate independent instances of epistemic non-predictive conditionals and hypothetical predictive conditionals (in the sense of Dancygier), respectively, and that they set up propositional-logic arguments of different classic forms, i.e. the modus ponendo ponens form (direct ICCs) and the denying the antecedent form (indirect ICCs). However, they do not explicitly express the conclusion of the argument, as they lack a main clause, but leave it to be inferred by the addressee.

About the authors

Sarah D’Hertefelt

Sarah D’Hertefelt obtained her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Leuven, and currently teaches English proficiency at the University of Brussels (VUB, Belgium). Her research interests include complementation and conditionality, insubordination and Germanic languages.

An Van linden

An Van linden is Assistant Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Liège and affiliated researcher in the research unit Functional and Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her research interests include the analysis of clause combining, mood and modality, information structure and grammaticalization in the NP, from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, in the Germanic languages as well as in typologically diverse languages. She is also describing Harakmbut, an unclassified language from the Peruvian Amazon.

Acknowledgements

Work on this article was supported by project GOA/12/007, funded by the Research Council of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). Authorship of this paper is shared jointly. D’Hertefelt submitted the first version of the manuscript in 2014, but was unable to continue work on the paper due to a change of employment. She invited Van linden, who co-supervised her (2015) PhD, to revise the manuscript. Van linden subsequently revised the manuscript substantially in response to the comments of three anonymous referees, whom we thank for their input. Changes in the argument and the form of the paper were substantial enough to warrant joint authorship. We would also like to thank Jean-Christophe Verstraete for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Appendix: Transcription conventions

ggg

marks clearly audible, non-linguistic speaker sounds, e.g. laughter

xxx

stands for unintelligible or non-transcribed speech

[words]

words which we added to make either the original or the translation more idiomatic/comprehensible

List of abbreviations
2

second person

3

third person

cond

conditional

dem

demonstrative

inf

infinitive

interj

interjection

neg

negation

papa

past participle

pl

plural

prs

present

prt

particle

pst

past

sg

singular

Corpus

CGN, Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (‘Spoken Dutch Corpus’). Nederlandse Taalunie. More information online at http://lands.let.ru.nl/cgn/(20 January 2017).

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Published Online: 2017-8-18
Published in Print: 2017-8-28

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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