Singular Agreement in Special Partitive Constructions in Dutch

Radboud University Nijmegen, Centre for Language Studies, Postbus 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, Netherlands [ [email protected] ] [ [email protected] ] [ [email protected] ] *

We are most grateful to Roeland van Hout for his help with the statistical analyses of the data, and to Lukas Reinarz, who collected and annotated the German data. We would like to thank Sebastian Collin, Geertje van Bergen, Ad Foolen, Johan Kobben, Sander Lestrade, Vera van Mulken, Kees de Schepper, Wessel Stoop, Peter de Swart, Thijs Trompenaars, Ruti Vardi, Puck Wildschut, and Martine Zwets for helpful discussions and comments. A special word of thanks goes to Johan Kobben and Vera van Mulken for translating the Dutch fragments. Versions of this paper were presented at the conferences Structural alternations: Speaker and hearer perspectives (Groningen, August 2011), TIN-dag 2012 (Utrecht, February 2012), and New ways of analyzing syntactic variation (Nijmegen, November 2012). We thank the audiences for their questions and comments. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. Introduction

A reader of the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad, who deeply regretted the retirement of its columnist J. L. Heldring, published the following comment on the newspaper’s website (bold is ours; throughout the article, we put the finite verb with singular or plural agreement in this construction in boldface):¹

• (1)

This compliment prompted the response of Frits Abrahams, another columnist in the same newspaper, that the reader’s comment was an example of an “incorrect” construction Heldring had been fighting against in vain for all these years: a restrictive relative clause in which the finite verb agrees with the numeral one instead of with the subject of the relative clause, that is, the plural head noun NRC-columnists.² According to prescriptive grammar rules in Dutch, the singular verb form had ‘have.PST.SG’ in 1 should have been the plural form hadden ‘have.PST.PL’. This particular “agreement error” occurs extremely often in Dutch, as also noted by Heldring, quoted by Abrahams as follows: “Deze fout komt zo vaak voor dat ik niet alle passages waarin ik haar aantrof, ga citeren” [This error is made so often that I am not going to quote all phrases in which I encountered it.]

The same “error” can...