Pleonastic Tet

Abstract

The empirical focus of the chapter is pleonastic tet in the Lapscheure dialect. At first sight, tet looks like a third person neuter pronoun which functions as a pronominal doubling element in the subject doubling pattern. The chapter first recapitulates the arguments against treating tet as a subject doubler (Haegeman 1986, 1992, Haegeman and vandeVelde 2006). Distributionally, tet is shown to differ from strong/doubling subject pronouns, from weak subject pronouns, from non-subject clitics and from discourse-related adverbs.Following Grohmann (2000), van Craenenbroeck and Haegeman (2005, 2007) and Haegeman and vandeVelde (2006), it is proposed that tet lexicalizes a functional projection ('FP') which demarcates TP and CR This expressive function of tet is similar to that of discourse-related modal particles (Kratzer 1999) and suggests that FP is a modal or discourse-related projection. On the other hand, given its licensing conditions, tet also seems to share crucial properties of 'subject' elements and on this basis FP might be identified as 'SubjP' (Rizzi 2006), the highest subject projection (see also Cardinaletti and Repetti 2005; Chinellato 2005; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006).Two issues are further examined: (i) the fact that the intervention of tet between the agreeing complementizer and the subject remains compatible with complementizer agreement. It will be proposed that, thanks to its featural underspecification, tet can mediate the agreement relation between C and the subject. (ii) The fact that pleonastic tet alternates with the form hij, which corresponds to the third person masculine pronoun. Following Rooryck (2001) it is proposed that both tet and hij are featurally underspecified and thus can take up a pleonastic function.