Pronoun Doubling in the Dialects of Dutch

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Marjo van Koppen
Universiteit Leiden
Abstract:
We discuss doubling of the subject pronoun in the dialects of Dutch in three types of sentences: embedded clauses, inverted main clauses and subject-initial main clauses.
In pronoun doubling constructions the second pronoun is always strong. The first prononoun can be either a clitic or a strong pronoun depending on the type of sentence it is in. In embedded clauses and in inverted main clauses the first pronoun has to be a clitic, in subject-initial main clauses the first pronoun can only be strong.
Two questions arise from this distribution:
  1. Why can the second strong pronoun in embedded and inverted main clauses not be preceded by another strong pronoun?
  2. Why can the second strong pronoun in subject-initial main clauses not be preceded by a clititc pronoun?
We argue that clitics need a phonologically realised head to their left to adjoin to. As subject initial main clauses do not have a phonologically filled C0-position (Zwart 1993), subject clitics can not occur in this type of sentences. This is born out by the impossibility of the subject ie ('he') to occupy the sentence initial position in standard Dutch. This clitic can occur in an embedded clause, in which it adjoins to the complementizer.
For the embedded clauses and the inverted main clauses we assume that doubled subject pronouns are generated as one DP. At PF the clitic moves out of the D0-head to adjoin to a host in C0. For the subject-initial main clauses this configuration is not available, because two strong pronouns cannot be generated as one DP. The answers we provide are:
  1. The second strong pronoun in embedded clauses and inverted main clauses cannot be preceded by a strong pronoun because Agr0 has moved to C0.
  2. The second pronoun in subject-initial main clauses cannot be preceded by a strong pronoun because C0 is empty, and thus the clitic pronoun is not able to find a suitable host at PF.
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Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND)