oa De imperativische infinitief in het Nederlands - Een corpusgebaseerde benadering

This paper is a corpus-based investigation of the imperatival infinitive in Dutch. It offers an analysis of the distribution and the frequency of the form in present-day and historical Dutch, with reference to the imperative. It also examines the pragmatic functions that the imperatival infinitive fulfills in contemporary discourse. The prototypical use of the form is defined and compared to the most convincing characterization of its semantics in the literature. The paper concludes with a study of the correlation of the imperatival infinitive with negation, which is explained in terms of politeness.