You are what you is: Verbal agreement variation and change in Early Modern Dutch

Much ink has been spilled over the question how the pronoun u ‘you’ came to be used as a polite form of address in subject function in the history of Dutch, and the role epistolary forms of address played in it. What has so far escaped attention is the form that verbal agreement takes with u. In present-day Dutch, there is variation in verbs that have distinct second and third person forms. The current paper traces the diachronic development of this variation in a corpus of letters from the 17th and 18th centuries and argues that the present-day variation is the result of top-down and bottom-up tendencies: the downward spread of upper class (written) forms of address requiring third person agreement and the initial use of the position-dependent agreement system of gij, and analogical pressure against it, from below.