Despite its diminutive size, presentative er – as used in sentences such as Er staat een struisvogel op het dak ‘There is an ostrich on the roof’ – continues to elude linguistic definition. Although er has been on the linguistic agenda for more than 100 years, linguists keep on disagreeing on such issues as er’s morphological, syntactic and semantic status.

The research we report on in this paper represents a radical alternative to most existing descriptions of er (cf. Grondelaers & Brysbaert 1996 and Grondelaers 2000). First, it does not focus on sentence-initial presentative er, but on the er which is believed to be "optional" in contexts such as Op het dak is (er) een struisvogel ‘On the roof (there) is an ostrich’ (cf. De Rooij 1991: 113). These adjunct-initial presentative sentences represent the ideal diagnostic context "to tease out the true sense" of er (Bolinger 1977: 93), since any syntactic, semantic or functional difference between the variant with and without er can only be attributed to the presence or absence of er.

In addition, the investigation is based on two types of empirical findings. Apart from collecting offline data from an extensive, stylistically and geographically controlled corpus, we also conducted a series of psycholinguistic experiments in which er’s contribution to adjunct-initial sentences was monitored online (it is a major ambition of this paper to demonstrate that the online part of the research is indispensable where the investigation of highly abstract grammatical meaning is concerned).

The off- and online investigations demonstrate

1. that presentative sentences with er rarely contain informationally rich subjects, but often contain negated subjects;
2. that the subject in presentative sentences with er rarely "persists" in discourse after it has been introduced (Givon 1983: 14 ff.);
3. that er significantly facilitates the processing of the subject entity in presentative sentences in which the preposed adjunct refers to an abstract or contextually non-activated entity;
4. that er significantly facilitates the processing of subject entities which are incongruent with the inferences generated by the preposed adjunct and the main verb.

We conclude the talk with a characterisation of er’s function. We will suggest that er is a presentative particle the speaker inserts when he expects that the hearer will invest too much energy in the processing of a subject which, although it is located in the sentence-final position restricted to maximally "newsworthy" items, is of limited communicative importance. By using er, the speaker warns the hearer for the subject, and advises him to deactivate the inferences generated with respect to the subject, in order to guarantee as cost-free a processing of the subject as possible.

References