The goal of our paper is to provide a description of an apparent V3 pattern which is salient with some speakers of the Ghent dialect and is illustrated in (1), from Vanacker (1980:76).
(1) Vroeger, DIE bakten wij vier soorten brood
‘We used to bake four kinds of bread.’
In such examples, what would be an initial adverbial constituent in the root clause is separated from the finite verb by what Vanacker (1980) labels a ‘pleonastic’ element. At first sight DIE is optional and it has no impact on the truth conditions of the proposition that it introduces.
In the first part of the paper we provide a description of the distribution of DIE. We also compare its distribution with that of the more widely distributed resumptive adverbs dan (‘then’) and daar (‘there). Our account is based both on authentic data drawn from corpora and from anecdotal observations as well as on the results of elicitations with 12 native speakers of the dialect.
In the second part of the paper we provide an analysis in terms of Wolfe’s (2016) typology of the syntax of V2. Adopting the articulated structure of CP as elaborated in the cartographic framework, we propose that DIE is an overt spell out of the head Force and as such a root complementiser.