Early modern reader management: begin+infinitive as a discourse marker in P. C. Hooft’s Dutch prose

Abstract This article combines linguistic, rhetorical and material perspectives on early modern reader management in order to investigate how the Dutch historian P. C. Hooft (1581–1647) guided his readers through a new genre: humanist history written in the vernacular. Central to this paper is the linguistic construction begin+infinitive , which is known to have text‐structuring functions in several historical varieties. Study of this construction in historical Dutch, however, is currently lacking. Although the Roman historian Tacitus, Hooft’s classical writing model, largely avoided the begin... Mehr ...