Oblieke subjecten in het Nederlands?: De casus wachten.

In this paper, I argue that the oblique argument of the Dutch two-place predicate wachten 'wait' behaves syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically as a subject. Conversely, its morphological subject behaves as an object. The starting point of this study is an instance of conjunction reduction in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, in which the oblique argument of wachten is left unexpressed on identity with the nominative subject in the first conjunct, thereby affirming its status as a subject. Five additional subjecthood tests lend further support to this claim. They show that the oblique argument of wachten is strongly associated with the first position in declarative clauses, that it systematically inverts with the conjugated verb, and that it is often pronominal, definite, and nearly always animate. The data for this study have been randomly extracted from the nlTenTen20 corpus (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]