Introduction

This section is devoted to R-PRONOMINALIZATION and R-EXTRACTION. The first notion refers to pronominalization of the nominal complement of a preposition by means of a so-called R-word, which must precede the preposition. In (3) we give two examples with the R-word er, which will be glossed as there for reasons that will become clear when we discuss the examples in (6).

Pronominal R-words like er will normally be referred to as R-PRONOUNS, although we will also use the notation [+R] pronouns when they are discussed in contrast to [-R] pronouns like hij/hem ‘he/him’. The combination of an R-pronoun and its associate adposition will be referred to as a PRONOMINAL PP.

Table 1, which is based on the classification of the pronouns developed in Section N5.2, shows that all third person, non-anaphoric [-R] pronouns that can be used independently as arguments have a [+R] counterpart. The fact that these [+R] pronouns all contain an /r/ is responsible for their name.

Table 1 shows that the [-R] pronouns can be divided into four main groups by means of the features [±NEUTER] and [±HUMAN]. For the referential, demonstrative and relative pronouns (group A), the gender distinction is the most prominent one, although it must be noted that most nouns that refer to [+HUMAN] entities are [-NEUTER] as well; nouns with the feature constellation [+NEUTER] and [+HUMAN] are typically diminutives (exceptions are the noun meisje ‘girl’, which has the formal characteristics of a diminutive, the noun kind ‘child’, and a number of nouns with a negative connotation like wijf ‘bitch of a woman’ and mens ‘person’). For the interrogative and quantificational pronouns (group B), only the distinction between [+HUMAN] and [-HUMAN] is relevant. As illustrated in (2), and to be discussed more extensively in Section 5.1, [+R] pronouns are typically, but not exclusively, used as alternative realizations of [-HUMAN] pronouns; see Table 2 in Section 5.1.7 for an overview.