(Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch: Structures and semantic–pragmatic values

•Corpus study of patterns of (semi-)autonomous dat ‘that’ subordination in Dutch.•Discovery of a number of new patterns in Dutch grammar.•Construction types treated separately in the few extant accounts are linked together.•The types share a semantic–pragmatic value of interpersonal meaning.•We propose a diachronic explanation for this shared value in terms of hypoanalysis.

This article presents an analysis of autonomous and semi-autonomous subordination patterns in Dutch, some of which have so far gone unnoticed. It proposes a four-way classification of such constructions with the general subordinator dat (‘that’), drawing on Internet Relay Chat corpus data of Flemish varieties. Generalizing over the four types and their various subtypes distinguished here, we find that they all share the semantic property of expressing interpersonal meaning, and most of them also have exclamative illocutionary force. We propose a diachronic explanation for this shared semantic–pragmatic value in terms of the concept of hypoanalysis, and assess to what extent our proposal meshes with extant ellipsis accounts of the patterns studied.