Poor weak het ‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with order het-copula-pronoun Dutch. We argue that complex interaction clefts between case, and word can be explained from radical featural defectivity ‘it’: ‘it’ has third person (3p) feature, but no number, strength gender features. show is different all personal pronouns major dialect groups Dutch it never shows any case distinction. The absence on makes possible necessary for pronoun to occur nominative cleft. Similarly, number feature specification plural clefts. Finally, we Standard two subgrammars, one which additional requirement finite copula agree both pronoun.