Tracing the history of deontic NCI patterns in Dutch: a case of polysemy copying

While the so-called “nominative-and-infinitive” (NCI) is no longer a productive construction in Dutch, the grammar of Present-day Dutch still contains a small set of lexically substantive NCI patterns, most notably geacht worden te and verondersteld worden te. Like their English formal equivalent be supposed to, these Dutch patterns can instantiate both evidential and deontic constructions, the latter being the most frequent one in Dutch. This paper focuses on the history of these deontic uses. We show that, with both patterns, the deontic use did not really take off until well into the second... Mehr ...