Person and number syncretisms in Dutch

The aim of this paper is to make sense of the typologically quite exceptional pattern of person neutralization in the plural as we find it in Dutch verbal paradigms. We argue that Dutch, and most of its dialects, have a structural pattern of syncretism in their verbal paradigm: there are no person-distinctions in the plural. The main question of this paper is: where does this structural pattern of neutralization in Dutch come from, if we cannot explain it as a typologically wellattested pattern? As a first step, note that although the pattern is typologically quite odd, it conforms to another... Mehr ...