Eerstezinsdeeldeletie in het Nederlands

Abstract

Abstract First-constituent-deletion in Dutch. What topic drop is and what it is not This paper discusses the phenomenon of pronoun deletion in Dutch. In the position before the finite verb a 3rd person pronoun may be deleted. The deletion of the pronoun is constrained by the recoverability condition, which requires that its referential features can be reconstructed from the context. It will be argued that only the deletion of a d(emonstrative)-pronoun is ‘topic drop’, which is typical for spoken Dutch. Deleted topic d-pronouns are subject to the same syntactic conditions as overt topic d-pronouns (Van ). Like the overt topic d-pronoun, the deleted d-pronoun refers to the focus constituent of the preceding sentence. A deleted p(ersonal)-pronoun, by contrast, does not have a uniquely determined antecedent and therefore it cannot be analyzed as discourse topic drop. In written texts, it solely maintains the preceding subject referent. I will further discuss the deletion of 1st person pronouns and the deletion of d-pronouns in imperatives.