Word order in the Dutch middle field: Thirty years after Verhagen’s thesis

Verhagen’s thesis on the relative order of nominal arguments and sentence adverbials in the middle field of the clause argued that the order variation found in Dutch can be described in a more insightful way within a functional approach than within a formal, generative grammar. This was true in the 1980s, when generative grammar was concerned with competence only. In current generative grammar, however, the output of the computational system is interpreted and filtered by the performance systems, which opens the possibility of formally accounting for certain aspects of meaning and intonation. I will argue that this refutes Verhagen’s claim