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Agreement on verbs and complementisers
quickinfo

The Frisian system of agreement displays a number of homophonies. For example, Frisian verbs do not distinguish the feature <person> in the plural.

The <2SG> verb forms are special in that they are compatible with the absence of the subject, the second person singular pronoun do you. This phenomenon is also referred to as pro-drop. In addition, the Frisian <2SG> is special in not allowing the subject pronoun to be premodified.

The <2SG> agreement appears not only on verbs but also on complementisers (10.3). Various tests make it clear that the <2SG> suffix on the complementiser is an instance of agreement and not a clitic.

Frisian regularly features double complementisers. In addition, Frisian shows reduction of the complementiser dat that to /t/.

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More details about agreement on verbs and complementisers can be found by following the corresponding links:

extra
Literature

More details can be found in De Haan (2010) [English translation of De Haan (1997)].

References
  • Haan, Germen J. de1997Voegwoordcongruentie in het FriesHoekstra, E. & Smits, C. (eds.)Vervoegde voegwoorden: lezingen gehouden tijdens het Dialectsymposion 1994Cahiers van het P.J. Meertens-Instituut 9Amsterdam50-67
  • Haan, Germen J. de2010Complementizer agreementHoekstra, Jarich, Visser, Willem & Jensma, Goffe (eds.)Studies in West Frisian GrammarLinguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 161John Benjamins Publishing Company215-232
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