s‘Hoe dat zo?’

• Published in: Nederlandse taalkunde (Groningen) 2024-01, Vol.29 (3), p.334
• Main Author: Schermer, Ina
• Format: Article
• Language: dut
• Subjects: Clauses; Dutch language; Parenthetical expressions; Syntactic structures; Verbs
• ISSN: 1384-5845; 2352-1171
• DOI: 10.5117/NEDTAA2024.3.002.SCHE

In Dutch sentences like Ik ga verhuizen, zei Jan (‘I am going to move, said John’), the first part contains direct speech, that is followed by the reporting clause zei Jan ‘said John’. The latter is a parenthetical and as such it can also be inserted in the middle of the quote: Ik ga, zei Jan, verhuizen. A remarkable feature of this type of sentences is that the reporting clause starts with subject-verb inversion (zei Jan), which has been explained in previous literature as a consequence of the presence of a quotative operator. In Dutch, this operator can always be replaced by the word zo ‘so’: Ik ga verhuizen, zo zei Jan / Ik ga, zo zei Jan, verhuizen. Contrary to previous accounts, I propose to view zo as a resumptive adverb and the reported direct speech construction as a left dislocation construction, which accounts for the inversion without having to adopt the presence of an underlying operator. Moreover, I argue that the possibility to use zo in the reporting clause indicates that the verbs/predicates in that clause are (used as) ‘spreek’ (speak) verbs. As such they are intransitive, which explains why reporting clauses with obligatory transitive verbs but no object are nonetheless grammatical. The use of these verbs is also the source of the ‘literal’ (demonstrational) character of quoted speech.