A constructionist account of the Modern Dutch adnominal genitive

In this paper it is proposed that otherwise obsolete agreement morphology which is used productively but is no longer part of a case system can be effectively accounted for within a constructionist framework. The Dutch case system was lost by the 15th century; nonetheless, a fragment of the adnominal genitive continued to be used and today it preserves agreement morphology that is otherwise absent from the language. Although potentially problematic for a traditional account of Dutch morphosyntax, a constructionist, usage-based account can explain the retention and current regularity of this genitive fragment.