Poor weak het ‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het ‘it’: het ‘it’ has a third person (3p) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het ‘it’ is different from all personal pronouns in the major dialect groups of Dutch in that it never shows any case distinction. The absence of case on het ‘it’ makes it possible and necessary for the pronoun to occur in the nominative in a cleft. Similarly, the absence of number in the feature specification of het ‘it’ makes plural agreement with the pronoun possible and necessary in clefts. Finally, we show that Standard Dutch has two subgrammars, one of which has the additional requirement that the finite copula agree in person with both het ‘it’ and the pronoun.