Lezing Jolien Scholten: Een asymmetrie in concordantie in Nederlandse dialecten

Een asymmetrie in concordantie in Nederlandse dialecten: verschil in vervreemdbaar en onvervreemdbaar bezit in bezittelijke voornaamwoorden.

Lezing door Jolien Scholten (PhD, Universiteit Utrecht). Hieronder een abstract in het Engels.

An agreement asymmetry in Dutch dialects: An alienable-inalienable distinction on possessive pronouns

Dialects in Flanders and in the East and South-East of the Netherlands display an agreement asymmetry on possessive pronouns. These pronouns agree with the noun it introduces. However, this agreement is absent when possessive pronouns introduce kinship nouns. This is shown for Vriezenveen Dutch in (1)-(4). The possessive pronouns in (1) and (2) introduce a non-kinship noun and they agree in gender and number with the noun. In (3) and (4) the possessive pronouns introduce a kinship noun and in those cases there is no agreement morphology on the possessive pronoun. My study also includes data from Wambeek Dutch and colloquial Flemish, which show a similar pattern.
 
(1)       mien-n     hoond              
my-m      dog.m
(2)       mien-e     auto
my-F       car.F
(3)       mien-ø     va
my  father
(4)       mien-ø     moe
my mother
 
It has been generally acknowledged that kinship nouns are relational notions. I will argue, following Barker (1995) and Vergnaud & Zubizarreta (1992), that this property is syntactically reflected, leading to different morphosyntactic properties of alienable and inalienable possessors. In short, I argue that kinship nouns syntactically introduce an argument in SpecnP, causing the features of the kinship noun to become invisible for agreement with the possessive pronoun. Non-kinship nouns, on the contrary, do not introduce an argument in SpecnP. As a consequence, the material in N is available for agreement with the possessive pronoun.