The morphosyntactic structure of articles and pronouns in Dutch
Johan Rooryck, Faculteit der Letteren · Leiden Repository (Leiden University) · 2003
This article argues for a radical morphosyntactic analysis of Dutch articles and pronouns. On the basis of Southern Dutch data, the indefinite article /œn/ is analyzed as a combination of Number /-n-/ and Gender /œ/. This analysis is extended to the definite articles /dœ/ and /hœt/, where /-D-/ is a marker for definiteness preceding or following Gender /œ/ via a syntactic movement operation. Agreement on demonstratives and adjectives is argued to follow a similar pattern. In all cases, movement is correlated with identity in feature specification type. Demonstratives such as /dit/ ‘this’, /dat/ ‘that’, and /hi:r/ ‘here’ and /da:r/ ‘there’, as well as question words such as /wat/ ‘what’ and /wa:r/ ‘where’, include a marker for proximate /-i-/ and distal /-a-/. The absence of question words containing proximate /-i-/ (such as */wi:r/ and */wit/) derives from the semantic incompatibility between Wh/w-/ and . proximate /-i-/.