Chapter 3. What a little word can do for you

This paper is meant as an appendix to den Besten (1981, 1998a), in which the idea is defended that the Afrikaans relative marker wat ‘WHAT’ is a complementizer. Now invariant wat can also be used in possessive relatives in colloquial Afrikaans, which seems to argue for a pronominal status of wat (at least in so fas as the pertinent environment is concerned). However, I will show that there are good reasons to stick to a unitary analysis for invariant relative wat.