Kim & Jahnke (2008) observed that in spoken English, the focus particle even sometimes occurs at the end of an utterance, like in (1):

(1) The ways in which our students communicate have changed … in the LAST FIVE YEARS even.

This raises the question whether the same phenomenon can be found in Dutch. The answer is positive: In the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN), we found enough examples to conclude that utterance-final zelfs is not a ‘performance error’. Kim & Jahnke distinguish three functions of this ‘construction’: mirative, additive and corrective. They also observe that utterances with final even typically sound spontaneous and have the flavor of on-line realization. 

The goal of my paper is threefold.

1. To analyze examples from the Dutch corpus and test whether the three functions that Kim & Jahnke distinguish hold for Dutch as well.

2. To discuss the three functions and the aspect of spontaneity in relation to each other, in order to get a more unified view of this construction.

3. To discuss utterance-final even in relation to utterance-final toch (‘yet’), which is conventionalized in Flemish Dutch, where it indicates that the utterance it is part of contains a weaker claim than a previous utterance (cf. Foolen 2006: 63). This effect, then, seems the opposite of what even does, which is ‘strengthening’ of an earlier utterance. 

References 

• Foolen, Ad (2006) Polysemy patterns in contrast: The case of Dutch toch and German doch. In: K. Aijmer & A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen (eds.) Pragmatic Markers in Contrast. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 59-72.
• Kim, Min-Jo & Nathan Jahnke (2008) Utterance-Final Even and Conventional Implicature. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2FhYzc2Y.