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Let middles in Dutch and German: False friends?

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Abstract

This paper provides a contrastive study of the so-called let middles between Dutch and German. It is argued that the subject of Dutch let middles is merged as the external argument of the matrix predicate laten ‘let’ and that the reflexive pronoun zich is merged as an embedded predicate’s thematic internal argument. By contrast, the reflexive sich in German let middles—as convincingly argued by Pitteroff (Non-canonical lassen middles. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Stuttgart, 2014; J Comp Germanic Linguist 18:1–64, 2015)—is merged as an expletive in the upper VoiceP. More concretely, Dutch let middles are parasitic on let causatives with an embedded passive VoiceP (i.e., passive causatives), whereas German let middles involve a reflexively marked anticausative with an embedded passive VoiceP. This syntactic difference derives the following three differences between Dutch and German let middles. First, while impersonal let middles are grammatical in German, they are not tolerated in Dutch. Second, the subject of Dutch let middles may correspond to the indirect object of the embedded double object verb, whereas the subject of German let middles must be the internal argument/direct object of the embedded predicate. Lastly, let middles in Dutch disallow a nominal indirect object of the embedded double object verb, while corresponding let middles with a nominal dative object are allowed in German. In addition, this analysis for Dutch let middles shows that an anticausativisation of the matrix predicate let is not generally necessary to form let middles.

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  1. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8571, Japan

    Toshiaki Oya

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Oya, T. Let middles in Dutch and German: False friends?. J Comp German Linguistics 20, 229–282 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-017-9092-2

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