Rethinking passives: The canonical GOAL passive in Dutch and its dialects

The main GOAL of this paper is empirical: it challenges the claim repeatedly found in
the current generative literature (Alexiadou et al. 2014; Broekhuis & Cornips 2004;
2012) that Dutch lacks the GOAL passive. As will be shown, among other things,
these claims fail to take into account the microvariation already reported in the
earlier generative literature.

The paper contains a detailed discussion of the properties of GOAL passive in West
Flemish, showing that, based on the standard diagnostics, the GOAL argument has
acquired subject status in the passive. This conclusion thus provides a challenge for
those accounts of Germanic passivization which are crucially based on the claim
that English is the only West Germanic languages with a canonical GOAL passive
(cf. Stein et al. 2016).