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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019
Edited by Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 36] 2019
► pp. 130–146
Part II: Selected papers presented at the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day of 2019

Restrictions on “Low” person agreement in Dutch specificational copular constructions

| IDS Mannheim
| University of Edinburgh
Agreement between the verb and its arguments as a predominant phenomenon in language has received major attention in the theoretical literature. One specific aspect under discussion concerns differences between number and person agreement, with the latter being the more restricted one (restricted by Baker’s 2008 SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar & Rezac 2003, or by multiple agreement see Schütze 2003; Ackema & Neeleman 2018). In this paper we address the restrictions on person agreement with a nominative noun phrase in a low position by investigating a relatively little-discussed configuration, namely specificational copular constructions in Dutch such as dat de inspiratie voor deze roman niet jij %bent/??is. We provide data from both a production and a rating study comparing 3/2 person agreement and show that what initially looks like a “person effect” in Dutch turns out to be a pronoun effect.
Keywords: Dutch, person agreement, copular constructions, syntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: “Low” person agreement and specificational copular clauses
  • 2.Production study
    • 2.1Method and participants
    • 2.2Conditions and materials
    • 2.3Results and statistical analysis
    • 2.4Summary
  • 3.Rating study
    • 3.1Method and participants
    • 3.2Conditions and materials
    • 3.3Results and statistical analysis
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00028.har
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

van Alem, Astrid & Sjef Barbiers
2021. Poor weakhet‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53:2 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Hartmann, Jutta M. & Caroline Heycock
2020. (Morpho)syntactic Variation in Agreement: Specificational Copular Clauses Across Germanic. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo
Hartmann, Jutta M. & Caroline Heycock
2023. Person effects in agreement with Icelandic low nominatives: An experimental investigation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:3 ► pp. 1029 ff. DOI logo

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