Have-doubling constructions in historical and modern Dutch

Abstract

Have-doubling constructions closely resemble periphrastic perfect tense constructions but have an additional, seemingly superfluous form of the verb have. Whilst these constructions are only found in a small number of modern Dutch dialects, they appear much more broadly in historical varieties of Dutch. In this article, I present new data from a corpus study of have-doubling constructions in Early Modern Dutch (ca. 1500-1700) which reveals both similarities and an important difference with the modern dialectal phenomenon. I argue that there are two structurally distinct types of have-doubling in this older period: one which contains a canonical adjective (i.e. with one internal argument) and one with a non-canonical adjective with a vP layer (Koeneman et al. 2011). I further show that this sheds new light on the observed link between doubling constructions and the rise of the periphrastic perfect tenses, with implications for the nature of this syntactic development.