In this respect, hoeven, in its quality of a verb, is completely different. There is a host of possible slots between hoeven and the negation niet, for instance a subject (in case of inversion), an indirect and/or direct object, and adverbs.

In adult speech, these slots are often filled. In the corpus of written Dutch it was found that only 11% of the utterances in which hoeven is licensed by niet contains the cluster which is so characteristic of the children's early utterances: hoeft niet.

Up to Chapter 2 Table of Contents