Connectives - Verbindingswoorden

Position of conjunctional adverbs

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The majority of the conjunctional adverbs behave like adverbs where word order is concerned. This is because they form part of the syntactic structure of the clause.

They can take up the first position (followed by the finite verb):

Bovendien is het gebied bij de plaats Visciano afgelegen en moeilijk toegankelijk.

Moreover, the area near the town of Visciano is isolated and difficult to access.

or follow the finite verb:

Uw treinkaartje doet tevens dienst als toegangsbewijs voor het museum.

Your train ticket also serves as an entrance ticket to the museum.

or follow the object:

Hij had hun geliefde kanarie daarom naar de studeerkamer verplaatst.

he had moved their beloved canary Therefore to the study.

Very often, however, a conjunctional adverb is placed at the beginning of a sentence because the writer or speaker wants to emphasise the role it plays in the structure of the text.

When a conjunctional adverb is placed elsewhere in the sentence (i.e. not in first position), this is often done because another element in the sentence requires more stress. In the example below Een ontheemde needs the stress more than daarentegen because this follows the pattern established in the first sentence where Een vluchteling also took up the first place.

Een vluchteling is iemand die zich als gevolg van ras, religie, nationaliteit, (...) ernstig bedreigd voelt en naar een ander land is gevlucht. Een ontheemde is daarentegen iemand die binnen de eigen landgrenzen blijft. Hij ontvlucht zijn woonplaats, maar niet zijn land.

A refugee is someone who feels seriously threatened because of his race, religion, nationality, (...) and has fled to another country. A displaced person, on the other hand, is someone who remains within the country's borders. He flees the place where he lives, but not his country.

Click >here for information on a few conjunctional adverbs whose place in the sentence does not always follow the normal order of adverbs.

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