oa The syntactic analysis of the Dutch absentive construction

This squib discusses Dutch absentive constructions like Jan is vissen ‘Jan is off fishing’. The literature on this construction so far has mainly paid attention to the meaning of the construction. This paper focuses on the syntactic analysis; two competing approaches will be compared according to which the verb zijn is, respectively, a copular verb and an auxiliary verb. It will be shown that the latter approach is the correct one.