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Inflected imperatives in Dutch dialects
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Inflected imperatives in Dutch dialects
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Journal Article
Inflected imperatives in Dutch dialects
2025
Overview
This paper investigates a striking agreement phenomenon in several Hollandic dialects of Dutch. In these dialects, imperatives of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verbs (such as kijken ‘look’ and horen ‘hear’) show number agreement with the subject of their embedded infinitival clause, an agreement pattern not attested in Standard Dutch. We refer to such constructions as ‘inflected imperatives’. We argue that in these cases the imperative verb lacks its usual second person subject. This absence leaves the matrix subject position available for the embedded subject to raise into, where it receives nominative case and triggers agreement on the imperative verb. This analysis is supported by three types of evidence: the correlation between case and agreement, the agentivity requirement on imperative subjects, and the restriction of inflected imperatives to ECM-verbs. Finally, we propose that these inflected imperatives represent an intermediate stage in an ongoing grammaticalization process, in which perception verbs are developing from verbs into clause-peripheral particles.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press
Subject
