Topics in Dutch imperatives

Abstract

This thesis investigates morphosyntactic microvariation in Dutch imperatives, with a focus on topicalization in imperatives (TII) (e.g. dat doe maar lit. “that do PRTC”). The empirical basis of the study is formed by new data on TII and related morphosyntactic properties collected from 10 Dutch dialects, and by data from dialect corpora. The analysis of TII focusses on two aspects, namely the option of TII, and the patterns of elements that can topicalize in TII. It will be argued that the option of TII can be accounted for by the interaction of the dialect type (in the sense of Postma 2011) and the presence of ablaut in the present tense verbal paradigm. Furthermore, it will be shown that variation in the elements that can topicalize in the different dialects can be reduced to three descriptive parameters, and a syntactic explanation for the existence of those parameters will be proposed.