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From the 16th century onward, the 2nd person singular pronoun du ‘you’ has been replaced by new pronouns gij/jij/jii in many Dutch dialects. The standard explanation attributes the decline to the emerging honorific plural pronouns such as gij in singular use. However, this sociological explanation lacks predictive power: French, German and Frisian honorifics (vous, Sie, jo) did not cause disappearance of tu/du/dou, nor did they do so in various dialects in the Netherlands. Alternatively, language internal triggers have been proposed that situate the trigger in the verbal inflection, e.g. ‘deflection’. These proposals, however, suffer from similar defects. In this study the problem is approached with dialect geographic tools using the GTRP dialect database. A significant correlation is found between the disappearance of du and the rise of double present tense paradigms (direct and inverted). It is found that Zwart’s result of distinct spell-out of V in direct and inverted contexts is paralleled in pronoun spell-out: those dialects that do not have distinct verbal spell-out show distinct pronoun spell-out in direct and inverted contexts. By formulating position dependent spell-out rules, it can be shown that the transition of one dialect type to the other can be held responsible for the loss of the pronoun specific to specCP (du).

We will discuss some aspects of the interface of the computational component and the semantic component of language. 1 We propose an interpretative theory, i.e. a grammar in which the semantic component does not only assign primitive meaning to terminal symbols (lexemes) but also to structures. We argue that the interpretation of terminal nodes constitutes lexical semantics; the interpretation of structures constitutes quantificational semantics. Zero-semantics and universal quantificationIn Dutch, there exists a curious effect that the lexical meaning of a word can be de-activated in function of the syntactic context. This may happen despite the fact that the word can have a meaning in the lexicon. We will call this phenomenon 'Zero Semantics' (ZS).We will give three examples of ZS in Dutch: loss of lexical meaning (la-b), nonsense-word formation in negative polarity contexts (lc), and the rise of universal quantification under dummy coordination (ld-e).

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Clause-Typing by [2] -the loss of the 2nd person pronoun du 'you' in Dutch, Frisian and Limburgian dialectsGertjan Postma (Meertens Institute Amsterdam) AbstractThe 2 nd person singular pronoun du 'thou' has been replaced by new pronouns gij/jij/jii 'you' in many Dutch dialects. The standard explanation attributes du's decline to the emerging honorific plural pronouns such as gij 'you' in singular use. In this study we trace a purely syntactic trigger for this change, thus replacing sociolinguistic and paradigmatic explanations (deflection). Using dialect geographic tools of the GTRP dialect database, we found a significant correlation between the loss of du and the rise of double present tense paradigms (direct and inverse). By defining two types of Verb Second, C-type V2 (Den Besten) and C/T-type V2 (Zwart), we show that a transition between those types predicts the loss of positiondependent spelled out pronouns such as du. The factor that blocks Den Besten-type V2 structures in clauses with [2] in Dutch dialects is the clausetyping property of the feature [2], which generate a violation that is similar to the that-trace violations with the [WH] feature.

In this paper I discuss three properties of Brazilian