Poor weak het 'it' and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het 'it'-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Acta linguistica hafniensia 2021-07, Vol.53 (2), p.221-241
Main Authors: van Alem, Astrid, Barbiers, Sjef
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agreement
Agreements
Alignment
Cleft constructions
clefts
Copulas
Dialects
Dutch dialects
Dutch language
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical case
Grammatical number
Pronouns
Word order
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het 'it'-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het 'it': het 'it' has a third person (3p) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het 'it' is different from all personal pronouns in the major dialect groups of Dutch in that it never shows any case distinction. The absence of case on het 'it' makes it possible and necessary for the pronoun to occur in the nominative in a cleft. Similarly, the absence of number in the feature specification of het 'it' makes plural agreement with the pronoun possible and necessary in clefts. Finally, we show that Standard Dutch has two subgrammars, one of which has the additional requirement that the finite copula agree in person with both het 'it' and the pronoun.
ISSN:0374-0463
1949-0763
DOI:10.1080/03740463.2021.1949919