Bouzouita, Miriam

Breitbarth, Anne

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

‘U is’ or ‘U bent’?Polite forms of address and verbal agreementin historical Dutch and Ibero-Romance*Miriam Bouzouita & Anne Breitbarth1 IntroductionIt is well-known that the (polite) forms of address inDutch underwent a cyclic re-placementbywhich the2nd personnominativeplural pronounghi/gij becametheformal 2nd nominative singular pronoun (V(os)-form), and later the informal 2ndnominative singular pronoun (T(u)-form), replacing older du, while the 2nd per-son accusative plural pronoun u ﬁrst became the accusative of the new singularV-form, and later the nominative V-form. The developments are summarised inTable 1 (adapted from van Leuvensteijn 2002: 289 and Vermaas 2005).Table 1: Cyclic shifts in 2nd person pronouns in the history of DutchSg PlNom Acc/Dat Nom Acc/DatMiddle Dutch (c. 1150-1500) du di ghi u1500-1700 du, ghi di, u ghi u17th/18th c. gij u gij uje/jij je/joutoday T: je/jij je/jou jullie jullie< gij lieden u liedenV: u u u u*We acknowledge invaluable input from our fellow ΔiaLing colleague Jacques VanKeymeulen to earlier versions of this paper.50A question that has not received much attention at all in the literature is howthe verbal agreement with these pronouns evolved. There are two theories re-garding the rise of nominative u that make diﬀerent predictions with respectto this question. First, according to e.g. Vor der Hake (1911), the nominativeuse of u arose from the accusative one by semantic shift. Second, as proposedby Van der Horst (2008: 1094), the nominative use of u arose via an interme-diate step, namely the epistolary forms of address consisting of a (possessive)pronoun and a honoriﬁc noun, U.Ed., U.E. (uw edelheid, ‘your honour’) and U.L.(uwe(r) liefde ‘your love / kindness’) used in letters from the 17th century onwards.Thesewere ﬁrst only used in writing, originally in chancery style for nobility, andthen oralised as uwé [uw’e:] / [’uwε], and spread top-town through social classes(Kern 1911, Heeroma 1934). The ﬁrst theory predicts that 2nd person agreementon the verb with subject-u should be older, as the accusative form of the 2nd per-son pronoun, when it is reanalysed as nominative, is still a 2nd person pronoun.Under the second theory, onewould expect that u(wé) should ﬁrst have occurredwith 3rd person agreement, as the form of address is a noun phrase.1 Van derHorst bases this latter theory on a comparison with a similar development inGerman, where the new V-form Sie ‘they> you(V)’, argued to be a pronominal-ization of Ihro Gnaden ‘yourmercies’ (e.g. Simon 2003), and goeswith 3rd personagreement on the verb.Ourpaperdeparts fromthreeobservations. First, there is variation inpresent-day Dutch regarding the agreement morphology on the ﬁnite verb that goeswith theV-formu:2 where thismorphology is not syncretic (as it is inmost verbs),it varies between 2nd and 3rd person agreement. In (1), this is illustrated for theverbs hebben ‘have’, zullen ‘shall’, and kunnen ‘can’.(1) 2nd person: u hebt/zult/kunt3rd person: u heeft/zal/kan‘you (V) have/shall/can’Second, the earliest (pre-1600!) occurrences of u used as a nominative pronounthat are reported in the literature occur with 2nd person agreement on the verb(Paardekooper 1996). This is a problem for Van der Horst’s theory of the devel-1“Als een briefschrijver de geadresseerdemetUwe Edelheid aanspreekt, gebruikt hij een sub-stantiefgroep met Edelheid als kern. Hier horen de persoonlijke, bezittelijke en wederkerendevoornaamwoorden van de derde persoon bij.” (van Leuvensteijn 2002: 290)2Weare not considering the variation in colloquial BelgianDutch regarding the use of u in thepresent paper.51opment of the verbal agreement with u.3(2) ende u hebt in dese wech al 7 vame 6 vame ende bij lant komende 5 vamen‘And you have in this way already 7 fathom, 6 fathom, and, coming ontothe shore, 5 fathom.’([1599] De tweede schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indië [...])(3) Wat belangt de regerijnge is oﬀ soude te lanck sijn te verhaelen, dat sult valles verstaen godt ons met lijﬀ in Nerlant helpende‘Concerning the government, it is or would be too long to tell (all), youshall understand all of that, if God help us with life in the Netherlands.’([1599] B. Journaal van Reijer Cornelisz.)The third observation comes from outside the Germanic sphere. To be moreprecise, Lara Bermejo (2015, 2016a,b) observes that in some Ibero-Romance (IR)varieties, such asWestern Andalusian Spanish, the plural V-form ustedes has re-placed the plural T-form vosotros, but the agreement of e.g. the reﬂexive pro-nouns, object clitics (os > se) and the ﬁnite verbs lag behind, varying between2nd and 3rd person agreement, as illustrated in (4). He also sketches a geograph-ical diﬀusion pattern, whereby the centre of innovation is situated in the Cádizprovince,whichhasmoreof the innovative3ĕđ features closer to thecenter (level4) than those areas that are further away from it (levels 1 (furthest away, leastadvanced) to 3).Sg PlModern Peninsular SpanishT Tú Vos-otrosV Usted UstedesModernWestern AndalusianT Tú Vos-otros> UstedesV Usted Ustedes(4) Ustedes sois hermanos.‘You(3ĕđ) are(2ĕđ) siblings’ (Lara Bermejo 2016b: 98)As can be seen from Table 2, Lara Bermejo identiﬁes a cline following which theustedesphenomenonprogresses fromonesyntactic context toanother,whereby3 Examples quoted after Paardekooper (1996: 70).52Table 2: Extension of the innovative 3ĕđ in the ustedes phenomenon(Lara Bermejo 2016a: 277)Stressed Reﬂexive Verbs Accusative Dative Possessivespronoun pronoun pronoun pronounStage 1 3pl 2pl 2pl 2pl 2pl 2plStage 2 3pl 3pl 2pl 2pl 2pl 2plStage 3 3pl 3pl 3pl 2pl 2pl 2plStage 4 3pl 3pl 3pl 3pl 2pl 2plStage 5 3pl 3pl 3pl 3pl 3pl 2plStage 6 3pl 3pl 3pl 3pl 3pl 3plstage 6 sees full completion of 3ĕđ, which manifests itself in Canarian and LatinAmerican Spanish.In thepresent paper,we report onapilot studyon thehistorical developmentof the verbal agreement going with the incipient use of epistolary forms of ad-dress and emerging nominative u in a corpus of letters (Letters as Loot from the17th and 18th c.; www.brievenalsbuit.nl), in order to determine how u couldbecome a subject pronoun, and how the verbal agreement evolved with it. Weargue that a very similar account to that proposed by Lara Bermejo (2016b) forthe southern IR varieties is justiﬁed for the historical Dutch data as well.42 Pilot study2.1 MethodWe searched the Letters as Loot corpus for forms of the verbs hebben ‘have’, zijn‘be’ and zullen ‘shall’ and a form of U, UE, or UL, both in straight and invertedword order. In order to obtain clear results regarding the verbal agreement, weremoved all the plurals (e.g., ue. zijn ‘you(r honourables) are’) because they aresynchretic in all three persons. We further restricted the search to the verbshebben, zijn and zullen because they do not have syncretic 2ĘČ/3ĘČ forms, asother verbs do), as in (5). Morphologically heeft/zal is syncretic with 3ĘČ, whilehebt/zult is unambiguously 2ĘČ, as shown in (6).(5) jij loopt vs. hij loopt4We only focus on the verbal agreement, but note that there are indications that the posses-sive agreement may be worth looking at at a later stage, cf. example (9).53(6) jij hebt/bent/zult (dialectal gij hebt/zijt/zult) vs. hij heeft/is/zalAsweobtained too fewdata for all separate regions in corpus, we focusedon thethree regions with most data, Zeeland, Noord- and Zuid-Holland, and recodedthe rest as “other”.Diatopic and diachronic spread of 2ĘČ verbal agreement with U/UE/UL17th c. 18th c.region 2ĘČ 3ĘČ total %2ĘČ 2ĘČ 3ĘČ total %2ĘČZeeland 7 6 13 53.8 4 4 8 50.0Zuid-Holland 4 7 11 36.4 0 8 8 0.0Noord-Holland 5 17 22 22.7 8 41 49 16.3other 1 10 11 9.1 4 10 14 28.62.2 Factors inﬂuencing the variation in verbal agreementWeanalysed the data usingmultiple logistic regression in Rbrul (Johnson 2009)5,and found that region is the strongest predictor of verbal agreement with UE /UL / U, besides inversion (p = 0.0115). The model shows that Zeeland stronglyfavours 2ĘČ agreement, while Zuid and Noord Holland prefer 3ĘČ agreement.On themap, this results ina similardiﬀusionpattern to theone thatLaraBermejo(2015, 2016b) described for the agreement with ustedes in Western Andalusiandialects. It appears that the use of u with 3ĘČ agreement was innovated in Hol-land and then diﬀused to Zeeland, where 2ĘČ was initially more frequent, butis gradually replaced over time. Interestingly, this seems to suggest that in factboth theories regarding the origin of the nominative use of u may at least par-tially be right: on the one hand, u became used as a subject due to the (cross-linguistically common) shift from accusative to nominative, but initially kept the2ĘČ agreement. On the other hand, the 3ĘČ agreementmay still have arisen un-der the inﬂuence of the epistolary forms.5Factor groups in the full model: region, period, gender, verb, inversion.54verbal agreement with U/UE/ULInput prob. 0.102Total N 136log-likelihood -63.605factor weight % (2ĘČ) Nregion p = 0.0115Zeeland 0.805 52.4 21Zuid-Holland 0.341 21.1 19Noord-Holland 0.390 18.3 71other 0.423 20.0 25inversion p = 0.0443straight 0.723 26.2 122inverted 0.277 7.1 14ﬁllThere is a second factor in the regressionmodel that is signiﬁcant at the p<0.05-level, viz. inversion. 2ĘČ agreement is signiﬁcantly more frequent in subject-initialV2 (“straight” contexts), asevidencedby the factorweight closer to1 (0.723),while 3ĘČ agreement much more likely in inversion contexts, as in (7) (factorweight closer to 0, viz. 0.277). We will return to this in Section 2.3 below.(7) dat sulke gedagten sijn nog nooijt of sullen nooyt inmyn opkomen daar voorheeft Uemyn te veel goeds gedaan‘that such thoughtshaveneverandnever shall crossmymind, youhave(3ĘČ)done toomuch good for me, for such a thing to happen.’(J.D. Piest to J.D. Praetorius, 1781/02/01)The other factors (period, gender and verb) could not be shown to be signiﬁ-cant.6 However, adjacency between the verb and the form of address may pos-sibly play a role, though we have not been able to test this yet, due to restric-tions of the search interface. Early examples of nominative U (i.e., not UL/UE)may indicate an inﬂuence, with non-adjacency correlating with 3ĘČ agreement.Observe that in (9), there is even a 3ĘČ possessive pronoun (zijn), besides the 3ĘČverb agreement.6We observed that UL is the form that most frequently occurs with 2ĘČ verbal agreement,and that it is mostly used by women, but disappears after 1700. The addressee of the women’sletters is typically the husband or another family member, so the fact that 2ĘČ sticks here forlongermay indicate that despite the introduction of a newpronoun, the informal 2ĘČ agreementremains used in informal contexts. UE is by far the most dominant form, and is most frequentlyused with 3ĘČ verbal agreement.55(8) want u zult hoope ik een wijf hebben voor mijne wederkompste‘For you shall(2ĘČ), I hope, have a wife before my return.’(Maria van Reigersberch to Nicolaes van Reigersberch, 1624)(9) Ik hoope u zijn geldt wel zonder verlies krigen sal‘I hope that you shall(3ĘČ) receive back your(3ĘČ) money without loss.’(Maria van Reigersberch to Hugo de Groot, 1627)(data from van Leuvensteijn 2002)2.3 Sketch of an analysisIn generative approaches, subject-verb agreement is analysed as a local depen-dency between a functional head, normally T (assigning nominative case to thesubject), and the subject (checking T’s φ-features). Typically, this dependencyinvolves the subjectmoving to (or through) SpecTP. Assuming a symmetric viewof V2, there is a second position for subjects in Dutch, viz. SpecCP.7 This is wherethe subject is found in subject-initial V2-clauses, while it remains in SpecTP in in-version contexts. In such contexts, SpecCP may be ﬁlled by a topic (amongstothers).In order to account for the variation in IR dialects, Lara Bermejo (2016b) ar-gues that the replacement of vosotros by ustedes proceeds in three steps: (i) 3ĕđustedes is merged as a topic (in SpecCP), doubled by the regular 2ĕđ subject inSpecTP, (10); (ii) 3ĕđ ustedes in SpecCP is doubled by a covert 2ĕđ clitic in SpecTP,triggering 2ĕđ agreement on the verb8, (11); and ﬁnally, (iii) ustedes is reanalysedas a subject, and triggers 3ĕđ agreement in SpecTP, (12).(10) Ustedes(,) vosotros no la conocéis. (Lara Bermejo 2016b: 101)‘You(3ĕđ) you(2ĕđ) do not know(2ĕđ) her.’(11) Ustedes ø sois hermanos. (Lara Bermejo 2016b: 98)‘You(3ĕđ) ø(2ĕđ) are(2ĕđ) siblings.’(12) Ustedes me han pedido un crédito. (Lara Bermejo 2016b: 104)‘You(3ĕđ) have(3ĕđ) askedme for a credit.’7We assume a very simpliﬁedmodel here, with TP and CP serving as abbreviations for a pos-sibly more ﬁne-grained structure as would be assumed under a cartographic analysis.8Lara Bermejo uses Uriagereka’s (1995) “big DP” hypothesis for this, which Rubio Alcalá(2014) proposes to extend to account for clitic doubling, with the head of DP being ﬁlled by theclitic, and the complement by the topic.56We argue that this proposal in terms of doubling of a topic by a covert pronouncan be transferred to account for the variation in verbal agreement with sub-ject u in historical Dutch, as well. Our quantitative analysis suggested that 3ĘČ isgaining on 2ĘČ agreement, and that 2ĘČ agreement is preferred in straight V2-clauses. Under our adaptation of Lara Bermejo’s proposal, 3ĘČ u is a full pronoun(in the sense of Cardinaletti & Starke) used as a topic in SpecCP in straight V2-clauses, and the 2ĘČ agreement with the verb is mediated by a null pronoun inSpecTP (13).(13) [CPu[3ĘČ] [C’[Czulti[2ĘČ] ] [TPø[2ĘČ] [VPeen wijf hebben ] [T[2ĘČ]ti]]The assumption of a null doubling pronoun in this position is justiﬁed by the am-ple occurrence of overt pronouns in exactly this position, doubling a pronoun inSpecCP in (Southern) Dutch dialects, like gie in (14).9(14) Ge kent gie da. (Haegeman & Van de Velde 2008: 163)‘You(2ĘČ/Pl) know you(2ĘČ) that.’In inversion contexts, u appears in SpecTP, and triggers 3ĘČ agreement on theverb, (15).(15) [CPdaarvoor [C’[Cheefti[3ĘČ]] [TPUe[3ĘČ] [VPmyn te veel goeds gedaan ][T[3ĘČ]ti]]Over time, the null pronoun in SpecTP (13) was lost, and u was reanalysed as asubject, with a trace in SpecTP in straight V2. 3ĘČ agreement spread to someextent, helped along by the syncretism between 2ĘČ and 3ĘČ agreement foundin most verbs. It is possible that the fact that epistolary forms of address whenspelled out should trigger 3ĘČ agreement, added to this.(16) [CPuj[3ĘČ] [C’[Czali[3ĘČ] ] [TPtj[3ĘČ] [VPeen wijf hebben ] [T[3ĘČ]ti]]This proposal leads us to expect that embedded clauses, too, should show signif-icantlymore 3ĘČ agreement in sentenceswith subject u in 17th and 18th c. Dutch.This hypothesis is corroborated by the diﬀusion of agreement patterns with ust-edes in the southern IR varieties, where third person agreement is found in em-bedded before main clauses (Lara Bermejo 2016a: 266-7). We leave this for fu-9This example is from the West Flemish dialect of Lapscheure, which has been extensivelydescribed and analysed by Liliane. Particularly the doubling of subject pronouns is one of herlong-standing research interests.57ture research. The fact that the variation between 2ĘČ and 3ĘČ agreement hasstabilised in the present-day language seems to reﬂect a certain degree of lexi-calisation: 2ĘČ with zijn, (preferred) 3ĘČ with hebben, for instance.DedicationWith this contribution,wewould like to thankLiliane for everything shehasdonefor both of us, and keeps doing, for her generosity, always open door, and openears throughout the years, for being a wonderful colleague, a mentor, a secondmother, and a friend. Besides, she is one of the reasons there is an atmospherewithin our research group ΔiaLing that encourages fruitful collaborations suchas this one, across language and framework boundaries.ReferencesHaegeman, L. & Van de Velde, D. 2008. Pleonastic tet in the Lapscheure dialect.Catalan Journal of Linguistics 7. 157–199.Vor der Hake, J.A. 1911. Is de beleefdheidsvorm U ’n verbastering van UEd.? DeNieuwe Taalgids 5. 16–24.Heeroma, K. 1934. De beleefdheidsvorm u omstreeks 1800. De Nieuwe Taalgids28. 328–332.Van der Horst, J.M. 2008. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse syntaxis. Part 2. Leu-ven: Universitaire Pers Leuven.Johnson, D.E. 2009. Getting oﬀ the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul forMixed-Eﬀects Variable Rule Analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3.359–383.Kern, J.H. 1911. Is de beleefdheidsvorm U ’n verbastering van U.E.? De NieuweTaalgids 5. 121–133.LaraBermejo, V. 2015. Los tratamientosde2Pl enAndalucía occidental yPortugal:Estudio geo- y sociolingüístico de un proceso de gramaticalización: UniversidadAutónoma deMadrid dissertation.Lara Bermejo, V. 2016a. Spontaneous dubbing as a tool for eliciting linguisticdata: The case of second person plural inﬂections in Andalusian Spanish. InM.H. Côté, R. Knooihuizen & J. Nerbonne (eds.), The future of dialects: Se-lected papers fromMethods in Dialectology XV. 261–281. Berlin: Language Sci-ence Press.58Lara Bermejo, V. 2016b. When agreement is for covert but not for overt: Thecase of ustedes plus second person plural inﬂections in Peninsular Spanish.Isogloss 2. 95–111.van Leuvensteijn, A. 2002. Epistolaire aanspreekvormen in de correspondentievanMaria van Reigersberch. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde118. 288–298.Paardekooper, P.C. 1996. U (ond.) ook voor 1600. Taal en Tongval 48. 70–71.Simon, H. 2003. Für eine grammatische Kategorie ‘Respekt’ im Deutschen. Syn-chronie, Diachronie und Typologie der deutschen Anredepronomina. Tübingen:Niemeyer.Vermaas, J.A.M. 2005. Veranderingen in deNederlandse aanspreekvormen van dedertiende t/m de twintigste eeuw. Utrecht: LOT.59

‘U is’ or ‘U bent’? Polite forms of address and verbal agreement in historical Dutch and Ibero Romance

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‘U is’ or ‘U bent’? Polite forms of address and verbal agreement in historical Dutch and Ibero Romance

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