Focus on appendices in Dutch

The augmentative right-peripheral element in Dutch sentences of the types Paul komt zeker niet, ook al heeft hij de tijd 'Paul will certainly not come, even if he has the time' & Morgen zou hij haar weer zien, zijn geliefde 'tomorrow he would see her again, his beloved', traditionally termed uitloop or appendix, is argued to have a primary purpose of self-correction, as either an actual conversational repair or a rhetorical device. General properties of Dutch appendices are (1) a high degree of freedom in the type of main-sentence constituent referred to & the syntactic form of the appendix & (2) semantic functions that include clarification, strengthening, weakening, falsification, & metalinguistic comment. Appendices frequently contain focus particles, leading to the view that corrections in general are likely to be in focus, as focus functions to evoke alternatives; focus marking on an appendix can be a metalinguistic signal to the listener that the alternative expressed in the appendix is preferred by the speaker. 28 References. J. Hitchcock