On Geographical Adequacy, or: How Many Types of Subject Doubling in Dutch

Abstract

In many southern Dutch dialects, subject doubling is found, i.e., the phenomenon that one single clause contains several, non-inflectional subject markers (be they clitics, pronouns, or lexical elements). The distribution of the phenomenon is influenced by a significant number of parameters, including clause type (main clause vs. subclause), word order, the type of subject in the clause (pronoun or not), the number of pronouns, etc. Taking these parameters into account, at least eight different syntactic patterns can be distinguished. In the recent literature, there is debate about whether these different syntactic patterns are manifestations of one single type of doubling (e.g., Haegeman 1992, 2004; De Geest 1993) or of two different types (Van Craenenbroeck and Van Koppen 2002). After discussing the attested patterns of subject doubling and their analyses in the literature (Section 1), we provide geographical evidence for distinguishing three different types of subject doubling (Section 1). In Section 3, the diachrony of subject doubling will be addressed.