Syntax of Dutch

Front matter

Syntax of Dutch Verbs and Verb Phrases Volume 1

Comprehensive Grammar Resources

Editors: Henk van Riemsdijk Istvan Kenesei

Contents

Volume 1

Abbreviations and symbols

Preface and acknowledgments

Chapter 1

1.1. General characterization

1.2. Verb classifications

1.3. Inflection

1.4. Mood

1.5. Tense, epistemic modality and aspect Chapter 2

Projection of verb phrases I: Argument structure Introduction

2.1. Nominal arguments

2.2. Complementives (secondary predicates)

2.3. PP-complements (prepositional objects)

2.4. AP-complements

2.5. Special verbs

Chapter 3 Projection of verb phrases II: Verb frame alternations Introduction

3.1. Main types

3.2. Alternations involving the external argument 3.3. Alternations of noun phrases and PPs

3.4. Some apparent cases of verb frame alternation

Volume 2

Chapter 4

Projection of verb phrases IIIa: Selection of clauses/verb phrases Introduction

4.1. Semantic types of finite argument clauses

4.2. Finite and infinitival argument clauses

4.3. Control properties of verbs selecting an infinitival clause 4.4. Three main types of infinitival argument clauses

4.5. Non-main verbs

4.6. The distinction between main and non-main verbs Chapter 5

Projection of verb phrases IIIb: Argument and complementive clauses Introduction

5.1. Finite argument clauses

5.2. Infinitival argument clauses

5.3. Complementive clauses

Chapter 6

Projection of verb phrases IIc: Complements of non-main verbs Introduction

6.1. Characteristics and typology of non-main verbs

6.2. Non-main verbs selecting a participle

6.3. Non-main verbs selecting a teinfinitive

6.4. Non-main verbs selecting a bare infinitive

Chapter 7 Projection of verb phrases IId: Verb clusters

7.1. Recognizing verb clusters

7.2. The hierarchical order of verbs in verb clusters

7.3. The linear order of verbs in verb clusters

7.4. Permeation of verb clusters

Glossary (Volumes 1 & 2) Subject index (Volumes 1 & 2) References (Volumes 1 & 2)

640 641 765 936

946 946 951 1003 1019

1119 1153 1173

Volume 3 (may be subject to change)

12.1. Arguments

12.2. Modifiers

12.3. Parts of constituents

Chapter 13 Word order in the clause V: The middle field of the clause

13.1. The global architecture of the middle field 13.2. Nominal argument shift 13.3. Focus movement

13.4. Negation Movement

13.5. Movement of weak proforms Chapter 14

Main-clause external elements Introduction

14.1. Left dislocation

14.2. Right dislocation

14.3. Afterthoughts

14.4. Vocatives

14.5. Discourse particles

Glossary (All Syntax of Dutch volumes) Subject index (Verbs and verb phrases 1-3)

References (Verbs and verb phrases 1-3)

Abbreviations and symbols

This appendix contains a list of abbreviations and symbols that are used in this volume. Sometimes, conventions are adopted that differ from the ones given in this list, but if this is the case this is always explicitly mentioned in the text.

References to the other volumes of the Syntax of Dutch.

References to the chapters and sections to the other volume in the series Syntax of Dutch are preceded by a letter: N + section # refers to the two volumes on nouns and noun phrases, A + section # refers to the volume on Adjectives and adjective Phrases, and P+section # refers to the volume on Adpositions and adpositi onal phrases. For example, refers to Section P3.2. in Hans Broekhuis (2013). Syntax of Dutch: Adpositions and adpositional phrases. Amsterdam: AUP.

Symbols and abbreviation used in the main text °XXX refers to the XXX glossary DomainD Domain of discourse

Abbreviations used in both the main text and the examples

AP Adjectival Phrase

CP Complementizer Phrase

DP Determiner phrase

NP Noun Phrase

Noun phrase used when the NP-DP distinction is not relevant NumP Numeral Phrase

PP Prepositional Phrase

PO-verb Verb with a prepositional object

QP Quantifier Phrase

TP Tense Phrase

VP Verb Phrase

Aux)-Main, Verb cluster. The numeral indices indicate the hierarchical order of the verbs: Vn+m is superior to V,. the en-dash indicates linear order: the element to the left precedes the element to the right in the surface order of the sentence: see Section 7.2, sub I, for details.

Symbols, Abbreviations and conventions used in the examples e Phonetically empty element

Ref Referent argument (external °thematic role of nouns/adjectives) Rel Related argument (internal thematic role of relational nouns) OP Empty operator

PG Parasitic gap

PRO Implied subject in, e.g., infinitival clauses

PROap Implied subject PRO with arbitrary (generic) reference

Trace (the original position of a moved element) XXX Small caps indicates that XXX is assigned contrastive accent

Abbreviations used as subscripts in the examples

dat

ben

nom

1%, 2", 3" person pl Plural Accusative poss Possessor Dative pred Predicate Beneficiary rec Recipient Nominative sg Singular

Abbreviations used in the glosses of the examples

AFF COMP prt.

PRT REFL

XXX

Affirmative marker

Complementizer: dat ‘that’ in finite declarative clauses, of ‘whether/if’ in finite interrogative clauses, and om in infinitival clauses

Particle that combines with a particle verb

Particle of different kinds

The short form of the reflexive pronoun, e.g., zich; the long form zichzelf is usually translated as himself/herself/itself

Small caps in other cases indicates that XxX cannot be translated

Diacritics used for indicating acceptability judgments no marking %

Unacceptable

Relatively acceptable compared to *

Intermediate or unclear status

Marked: not completely acceptable or disfavored form

Slightly marked, but probably acceptable

Fully acceptable

Varying judgments among speakers

Unacceptable under intended reading

Special status: old-fashioned, archaic, very formal, semantically incoherent, degraded/unacceptable for non-syntactic reasons, etc. The nature of the deviation is normally explained in the main text.

Other conventions xx/yy *xx/yy xx/*yy (xx) *(xx) (*xx)

Acceptable both with xx and with yy Unacceptable with xx, but acceptable with yy Acceptable with xx, but unacceptable with yy Acceptable both with and without xx

Acceptable with, but unacceptable without xx Acceptable without, but unacceptable with xx Alternative placement of xx in an example Impossible placement of xx in an example Necessarily implies

Does not necessarily imply

Italics indicate binding

Coindexing indicates coreference Counter-indexing indicates disjoint reference Unacceptable with index i, acceptable with index j Unacceptable with index j, acceptable with index i Constituent brackets of a constituent XP

Preface and acknowledgments

Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, Belgium-Flanders, Surinam, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. With about 22 million native speakers it is one of the world’s greater languages. It is taught and studied at more than 175 universities around the world (source: taalunieversum.org). Furthermore, Dutch is one of the most well-studied living languages; research on it has had a major, and still continuing, impact on the development of formal linguistic theory, and it plays an important role in various other types of linguistic research. It is therefore unfortunate that there is no recent comprehensive scientifically based description of the grammar of Dutch that is accessible to a wider international audience. As a result, much information remains hidden in scientific publications: some information is embedded in theoretical discussions that are mainly of interest for and accessible to certain groups of formal linguists or that are more or less outdated in the light of more recent findings and theoretical developments, some is buried in publications with only a limited distribution, and some is simply inaccessible to large groups of readers given that it is written in Dutch. The series Syntax of Dutch (SoD) aims at filling this gap for syntax.

2. Main objective

The main objective of SoD is to present a synthesis of currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It gives a comprehensive overview of the relevant research on Dutch that not only presents the findings of earlier approaches to the language, but also includes the results of the formal linguistic research carried out over the last four or five decades that often cannot be found in the existing reference books. It should be emphasized, however, that SoD is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory; the reader will generally look in vain for critical assessments of theoretical proposals made to account for specific phenomena. Although SoD addresses many of the central issues of current linguistic theory, it does not provide an introduction to current linguistic theory. Readers interested in such an introduction are referred to one of the many existing introductory textbooks, or to handbooks like The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, edited by Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk, or The Cambridge H andbook of Generative Syntax, edited by Marcel den Dikken. A recent publication that aims at providing a description of Dutch in a more theoretical setting is The Syntax of Dutch by Jan-Wouter Zwart in the Cambridge Syntax Guides series.

3. Intended readership

SoD is not intended for a specific group of linguists, but aims at a more general readership. Our intention was to produce a work of reference that is accessible to a large audience that has some training in linguistics and/or neighboring disciplines and that provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch. Although we did not originally target this group, we believe that viii Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and verb phrases the descriptions we provide are normally also accessible to advanced students of language and linguistics. The specification of our target group above implies that we have tried to avoid jargon from specific theoretical frameworks and to use as much as possible the lingua franca that linguists use in a broader context. Whenever we introduce a notion that we believe not to be part of the lingua franca, we will provide a brief clarification of this notion in a glossary; first occurrences of such notions in a certain context are normally marked by means of °.

4. Object of description

The object of description is aptly described by the title of the series, Syntax of Dutch. This title suggests a number of ways in which the empirical domain is restricted, which we want to spell out here in more detail by briefly discussing the two notions syntax and Dutch.

I. Syntax

Syntax is the field of linguistics that studies how words are combined into larger phrases and, ultimately, sentences. This means that we do not systematically discuss the internal structure of words (this is the domain of morphology) or the way in which sentences are put to use in discourse: we only digress on such matters if this is instrumental in describing the syntactic properties of the language. For example, Chapter N1 contains an extensive discussion of deverbal nominalization, but this is only because this morphological process is relevant for the discussion of complementation of nouns in Chapter N2. And Section N8.1.3 will show that the word order difference between the two examples in (1) is related to the preceding discourse: if pronounced with neutral (non-contrastive) accent, the object Marie may only precede clausal adverbs like waarschijnlijk ‘probably’ if it refers to some person who has already been mentioned in (or is implied by) the preceding discourse.

(1) a. Jan heeft waarschijnlijk Marie gezien. [Marie = discourse new] Jan has probably Marie seen ‘Jan has probably seen Marie.’ b. Jan heeft Marie waarschijnlijk gezien. [Marie = discourse old] Janhas Marie probably seen

‘Jan has probably seen Marie.’

Our goal of describing the internal structure of phrases and sentences means that we focus on competence (the internalized grammar of native speakers), and not on performance (the actual use of language). This implies that we will make extensive use of constructed examples that are geared to the syntactic problem at hand, and that we will not systematically incorporate the findings of currently flourishing corpus/usage-based approaches to language: this will be done only insofar as this may shed light on matters concerning the internal structure of phrases. A case for which this type of research may be syntactically relevant is the word order variation of the verb-final sequence in (2), which has been extensively studied since Pauwels (1950) and which has been shown to be sensitive to a large number of interacting variables, see De Sutter (2005/2007) for extensive discussion.

Preface and acknowledgments ix

(2) a. dat Jandatboek gelezen heeft. that Jan that book read has ‘that Jan has read that book.’ b. dat Jandat boek heeft gelezen. that Jan that book has read ‘that Jan has read that book.’

This being said, it is important to point out that SoD will pay ample attention to certain aspects of meaning, and reference will also be made to phonological aspects such as stress and intonation wherever they are relevant (e.g., in the context of word order phenomena like in (1)). The reason for this is that current formal grammar assumes that the output of the syntactic module of the grammar consists of objects (sentences) that relate form and meaning. Furthermore, formal syntax has been quite successful in establishing and describing a large number of restrictions on this relationship. A prime example of this is the formulation of so-called °binding theory, which accounts (among other things) for the fact that referential pronouns like hem ‘him’ and anaphoric pronouns like zichzelf ‘himself’ differ in the domain within which they can/must find an antecedent. For instance, the examples in (3), in which the intended antecedent of the pronouns is given in italics, show that whereas referential object pronouns like hem cannot have an antecedent within their clause, anaphoric pronouns like zichzelf ‘himself’? must have an antecedent in their clause, see Section N5.2.1.5, sub III, for more detailed discussion.

(3) a. Jjandenkt dat Peter hem/*zichzelf bewondert.

Jan thinks that Peter him/himself admires ‘Jan thinks that Peter is admiring him [= Jan].’ b. Jandenkt dat Peter zichzelf/*hem bewondert.

Jan thinks that Peter himself/him admires ‘Jan thinks that Peter is admiring himself [= Peter].’

Il. Dutch

SoD aims at giving a syntactic description of what we will loosely refer to as Standard Dutch, although we are aware that there are many problems with this notion. First, the notion of Standard Dutch is often used to refer to written language and more formal registers, which are perceived as more prestigious than the colloquial uses of the language. Second, the notion of Standard Dutch suggests that there is an invariant language system that is shared by a large group of speakers. Third, the notion carries the suggestion that some, often unnamed, authority is able to determine what should or should not be part of the language, or what should or should not be considered proper language use. See Milroy (2001) for extensive discussion of this notion of standard language.

SoD does not provide a description of this prestigious, invariant, externally determined language system. The reason for this is that knowledge of this system does not involve the competence of the individual language user but “is the product of a series of educational and social factors which have overtly impinged on the linguistic experiences of individuals, prescribing the correctness/incorrectness of certain constructions” (Adger & Trousdale 2007). Instead, the notion of standard x Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and verb phrases language in SoD should be understood more neutrally as an idealization that refers to certain properties of linguistic competence that we assume to be shared by the individual speakers of the language. This notion of standard language deviates from the notion of standard language discussed earlier in that it may include properties that would be rejected by language teachers, and exclude certain properties that are explicitly taught as being part of the standard language. To state the latter in more technical terms: our notion of standard language refers to the core grammar (those aspects of the language system that arise spontaneously in the language learning child by exposure to utterances in the standard language) and excludes the periphery (those properties of the standard language that are explicitly taught at some later age). This does not mean that we will completely ignore the more peripheral issues, but it should be kept in mind that these have a special status and may exhibit properties that are alien to the core system.

A distinguishing property of standard languages is that they may be used among speakers of different dialects, and that they sometimes have to be acquired by speakers of such dialects as a second language at a later age, that is, in a similar fashion as a foreign language (although this may be rare in the context of Dutch). This property of standard languages entails that it is not contradictory to distinguish various varieties of, e.g., Standard Dutch. This view is also assumed by Haeseryn et al. (1997: Section 0.6.2), who make the four-way distinction in (4) when it comes to geographically determined variation.

(4) e Types of Dutch according to Haeseryn et al. (1997) a. Standard language b. Regional variety of Standard Dutch c. Regional variety of Dutch d. Dialect

The types in (4b&c) are characterized by certain properties that are found in certain larger, but geographically restricted regions only. The difference between the two varieties is defined by Haeseryn at al. (1997) by appealing to the perception of the properties in question by other speakers of the standard language: if the majority of these speakers do not consider the property in question characteristic for a certain geographical region, the property is part of a regional variety of Standard Dutch; if the property in question is unknown to certain speakers of the standard language or considered to be characteristic for a certain geographical region, it is part of a regional variety of Dutch. We will not adopt the distinction between the types in (4b) and (4c) since we are not aware of any large-scale perception studies that could help us to distinguish the two varieties in question. We therefore simply join the two categories into a single one, which leads to the typology in (5).

(5) e Types of Dutch distinguished in SoD a. Standard Dutch b. Regional variety of Dutch c. Dialect of Dutch

We believe it to be useful to think of the notions in (5) in terms of grammatical properties that are part of the competence of groups of speakers. Standard Dutch

Preface and acknowledgments xi can then be seen as a set of properties that is part of the competence of all speakers of the language. Examples of such properties in the nominal domain are that non-pronominal noun phrases are not morphologically case-marked and that the word order within noun phrases is such that nouns normally follow attributively used adjectives but precede PP-modifiers and that articles precede attributive adjectives (if present); cf. (6a). Relevant properties within the clausal domain are that finite verbs occupy the co-called second position in main clauses whereas non-finite verbs tend to cluster in the right-hand side of the clause (see (6b)), and that finite verbs join the clause-final non-finite verbs in embedded clauses (see (6c)).

(6) a. de oude man in de stoel [word order within noun phrases] the old man in the chair b. Jan heeft de man een lied horen zingen. [verb second/clustering]

Jan has themanasong hear sing ‘Jan has heard the man sing a song.’ c. dat Jan de man een lied heeft horen zingen. [verb clustering] that Jan the man asong has hear sing ‘that Jan has heard the man sing a song.’

Regional varieties of Dutch arise as the result of sets of additional properties that are part of the competence of larger subgroups of speakers—such properties will define certain special characteristics of the variety in question but will normally not give rise to linguistic outputs that are inaccessible to speakers of other varieties; see the discussion of (7) below for a typical example. Dialects can be seen as a set of properties that characterizes a group of speakers in a restricted geographical area— such properties may be alien to speakers of the standard language and may give rise to linguistic outputs that are not immediately accessible to other speakers of Dutch; see the examples in (9) below for a potential case. This way of thinking about the typology in (5) enables us to use the language types in a more gradient way, which may do more justice to the situation that we actually find. Furthermore, it makes it possible to define varieties of Dutch along various (e.g., geographical and possibly social) dimensions.

The examples in (7) provide an example of a property that belongs to regional varieties of Dutch: speakers of northern varieties of Dutch require that the direct object boeken ‘books’ precede all verbs in clause-final position, whereas many speakers of the southern varieties of Dutch (especially those spoken in the Flemish part of Belgium) will also allow the object to permeate the verb sequence, as long as it precedes the main verb.

(7) a. dat Jan <boeken> wil <*boeken> kopen. [Northern Dutch] that Jan books wants buy ‘that Jan wants to buy books.’ b. dat Jan <boeken> wil <boeken> kopen. [Southern Dutch] that Jan books wants buy

‘that Jan wants to buy books.’

Dialects of Dutch may deviate in various respects from Standard Dutch. There are, for example, various dialects that exhibit morphological agreement between the xii Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and verb phrases subject and the complementizer, which is illustrated in (8) by examples taken from Van Haeringen (1939); see Haegeman (1992), Hoekstra & Smit (1997), Zwart (1997), Barbiers et al. (2005) and the references given there for more examples and extensive discussion. Complementizer agreement is a typical dialect property as it does not occur in (the regional varieties of) Standard Dutch.

(8) a. As, Wim komp.g, mot jo zorgə dat je tuis ben. when Wim comes must you make.sure that you at.home are ‘When Wim comes, you must make sure to be home.’ b. Azzo, Keesen Wim komma, mot jə zorgə dat je tuis ben. when Kees and Wim come must you make.sure that you home are “When Kees and Wim come, you must make sure to be home.’

The examples in (9) illustrate another property that belongs to a certain set of dialects. Speakers of most varieties of Dutch would agree that the use of possessive datives is only possible in a limited set of constructions: whereas possessive datives are possible in constructions such as (9a), in which the possessee is embedded in a °complementive PP, they are excluded in constructions such as (9b), in which the possessee is a direct object. Constructions such as (9b) are perceived (if understood at all) as belonging to certain eastern and southern dialects, which is indicated here by means of a percentage sign.

(9) a. Marie zet Peter/heMpossessor het kind op de kniepossessee- Marie puts Peter/him the child onto the knee ‘Marie puts the child on Peter’s/his knee. b. “Marie wast Peter/hemMpossessor de handenpossessee- Marie washes Peter/him the hands ‘Marie is washing Peter’s/his hands.’

Note that the typology in (5) should allow for certain dialectal properties to become part of certain regional varieties of Dutch, as indeed seems to be the case for possessive datives of the type in (9b); cf. Cornips (1994). This shows again that it is not possible to draw sharp dividing lines between regional varieties and dialects and emphasizes that we are dealing with dynamic systems; see the discussion of (5) above. For our limited purpose, however, the proposed distinctions seem to suffice. It should be stressed that the description of the types of Dutch in (5) in terms of properties of the competence of groups of speakers implies that Standard Dutch is actually not a language in the traditional sense; it is just a subset of properties that all non-dialectal varieties of Dutch have in common. Selecting one of these varieties as Standard Dutch in the more traditional sense described in the beginning of this subsection is not a linguistic enterprise and will therefore not concern us here. For practical reasons, however, we will focus on the variety of Dutch that is spoken in the northwestern part of the Netherlands. One reason for doing this is that, so far, the authors who have contributed to SoD are all native speakers of this variety and can therefore simply appeal to their own intuitions in order to establish whether this variety does or does not exhibit a certain property. A second reason is that this variety seems close to the varieties that have been discussed in the linguistic literature on “Standard Dutch”. This does not mean that we will not

Preface and acknowledgments xiii discuss other varieties of Dutch, but we will do this only if we have reason to believe that they behave differently. Unfortunately, however, not much is known about the syntactic differences between the various varieties of Dutch and since it is not part of our goal to solve this problem, we want to encourage the reader to restrict the judgments given in SoD to speakers of the northwestern variety (unless indicated otherwise). Although in the vast majority of cases the other varieties of Dutch will exhibit identical or similar behavior given that the behavior in question reflects properties that are part of the standard language (in the technical sense given above), the reader should keep in mind that this cannot be taken for granted as it may also reflect properties of the regional variety spoken by the authors of this work.

5. Organization of the material

SoD is divided in four main parts that focus on the four LEXICAL CATEGORIES: verbs, nouns, adjectives and adpositions. Lexical categories have denotations and normally take arguments: nouns denote sets of entities, verbs denote states-ofaffairs (activities, processes, etc.) that these entities may be involved in, adjectives denote properties of entities, and adpositions denote (temporal and locational) relations between entities.

The lexical categories, of course, do not exhaust the set of word classes; there are also FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES like complementizers, articles, numerals, and quantifiers. Such elements normally play a role in phrases headed by the lexical categories: articles, numerals and quantifiers are normally part of noun phrases and complementizers are part of clauses (that is, verbal phrases). For this reason, these functional elements will be discussed in relation to the lexical categories.

The four main parts of SoD are given the subtitle Xs and X phrases, where X stands for one of the lexical categories. This subtitle expresses that each part discusses one lexical category and the ways in which it combines with other elements (like arguments and functional categories) to form constituents. Furthermore, the four main parts of SoD all have more or less the same overall organization in the sense that they contain (one or more) chapters on the following issues.

l. Characterization and classification

Each main part starts with an introductory chapter that provides a general characterization of the lexical category under discussion by describing some of its more conspicuous properties. The reader will find here not only a brief overview of the syntactic properties of these lexical categories, but also relevant discussions on morphology (e.g., inflection of verbs and adjectives) and semantics (e.g., the aspectual and tense properties of verbs). The introductory chapter will furthermore discuss ways in which the lexical categories can be divided into smaller natural subclasses.

Il. Internal syntax

The main body of the work is concerned with the internal structure of the projections of lexical categories/heads. These projections can be divided into two xiv Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and verb phrases subdomains, which are sometimes referred to as the lexical and the functional domain. Taken together, the two domains are sometimes referred to as the EXTENDED PROJECTION of the lexical head in question; cf. Grimshaw (1991). We will see that there is reason for assuming that the lexical domain is embedded in the functional domain, as in (10), in which LEX stands for the lexical heads V, N, A or P, and F stands for one or more functional heads like the article de ‘the’ or the complementizer dat ‘that’.

The lexical domain of a lexical head is that part of its projection that affects its denotation. The denotation of a lexical head can be affected by its complements and its modifiers, as can be readily illustrated by means of the examples in (11).

(11) a. Jan leest.

Jan reads b. Jan leest een krant.

Jan reads a newspaper c. Jan leest nauwkeurig.

Jan reads carefully

The phrase een krant lezen ‘to read a newspaper’ in (11b) denotes a smaller set of states-of-affairs than the phrase lezen ‘to read’ in (11a), and so does the phrase nauwkeurig lezen ‘to read carefully’ in (11c). The elements in the functional domain do not affect the denotation of the lexical head but provide various sorts of additional information.

A. The lexical domain l: Argument structure

Lexical heads function as predicates, which means that they normally take arguments, that is, they enter into so-called thematic relations with entities that they semantically imply. For example, intransitive verbs normally take an agent as their subject; transitive verbs normally take an agent and a theme that are syntactically realized as, respectively, their subject and their object; and verbs like wachten ‘to wait’ normally take an agent that is realized as their subject and a theme that is realized as a prepositional complement.

(12) a. JaNagen lacht. [intransitive verb] Jan laughs b. JaMagen weet een oplossingtheme- [transitive verb] Jan knows a solution Cc. JaNagen. wacht op de postboderheme. [verb with PP-complement] Jan waits for the postman

Although this is often less conspicuous with nouns, adjectives and prepositions, it is possible to describe examples such as (13) in the same terms. The phrases between straight brackets can be seen as predicates that are predicated of the noun phrase Jan, which we may therefore call their logical SUBJECT (we use small caps to distinguish this notion from the notion of nominative subject of the clause). Furthermore, the examples in (13) show (a) that the noun vriend may combine with

Preface and acknowledgments xv a PP-complement that explicates with whom the SUBJECT Jan is in a relation of friendship, (b) that the adjective trots ‘proud’ optionally may take a PP-complement that explicates the subject matter that the SUBJECT J an is proud about, and (c) that the preposition onder ‘under’ may take a nominal complement that refers to the location of its SUBJECT J an.

(13) a. Janis [een vriend van Peter].

Jan is a friend of Peter b. Janis [trots op zijn dochter].

Jan is proud of his daughter c. Marie stopt Jan [onder de dekens].

Marie puts Jan under the blankets

That the italicized phrases are complements is somewhat obscured by the fact that there are certain contexts in which they can readily be omitted (e.g., when they would express information that the addressee can infer from the linguistic or non-linguistic context). The fact that they are always semantically implied, however, shows that they are semantically selected by the lexical head.