SIL talk by Lex Cloin-Tavenier (Utrecht University)

(S)he’s got a way: Proper nouns as possessors in Dutch manner adverbials

Recent work on the grammar of Dutch manner adverbials (henceforth MAs) has further developed the idea that MAs are uniformly PPs, despite the fact that they show a great deal of apparent structural heterogeneity as a class  (Cloin-Tavenier 2025; Corver 2025; Massaia 2025). From this perspective, Dutch adverbials like (1), in which a preposition (op) takes a nominal (DP) complement (die manier), are easy to reconcile with this PP hypothesis. However, patterns like (2), which feature a proper noun (among other material) following the preposition, are more puzzling, especially in the context of (3), which demonstrates that a proper noun by itself is no valid complement to Pº (despite strong arguments in favour of taking proper nouns to be DPs, cf. Longobardi 1994, etc.).

(1) Reinder zingt op die manier.

reinder sings on that manner

“Reinder sings in that way/like that.”

(2) Reinder zingt op z’n Madonna-‘s.

reinder sings on his Madonna-s

“Reinder signs like Madonna.”

(3) *Reinder zingt op Madonna.

(Intended under a manner reading of op Madonna)

In this talk, I argue that the additional syntactic material in the complement of Pº in Dutch proper noun PP MAs finds a natural place in an underlying possessive structure. I present an analysis linking Standard and spoken/dialectal Dutch proper noun PP MAs to possessor doubling constructions, and various superlative MA constructions. I conclude that there is rich PP-internal variation to discover, even in patterns that most seem to fit the PP hypothesis.

References