Inflectional Morphology and the Loss of Verb-Second In English

Abstract

Old English (OE) exhibits word-order patterns which are reminiscent of the Verb Second (V2) phenomenon found in many modern Germanic languages. Thus, fronting of some constituent often leads to subject-verb inversion, to a word order in which the finite verb occurs in second position. This chapter addresses the question of why V2 was lost in the history of English. It proposes that the loss of V2 in English resulted from the loss of empty expletives and ultimately of a change in the verbal morphology. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 contains some general observations on the loss of V2 in English. Section 5.3 discusses and rejects two previous explanations of the loss of V2, and develops a new account based on comparative evidence from modern Germanic. Section 5.4 shows how the loss of V2 can be related to change in the verbal morphology of English. Section 5.5 addresses some remaining issues, while Section 5.6 summarizes the chapter.

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

“…It stands in contrast to another tradition of analysis in which the verb only moves as far as I 0 =T 0 (Eyþórsson 1995;Pintzuk 1999;Haeberli 2002;Speyer 2010). Walkden (2014: 74-89) summarizes the arguments that the verb is in the C-domain: most importantly, there is a clear clausetype asymmetry in finite verb position and embedded topicalization (van Kemenade 1997), and the immediately preverbal constituent has the profile of a familiar topic without any requirement that it be the subject (see example (35)).…”

“…(ii) The immediately preverbal constituent in V3 clauses is usually a subject, but not always (Koopman 1996;Pintzuk 1999), and usually pronominal, but not always (Bech 1998(Bech , 2001Haeberli 2002). (iii) The immediately preverbal constituent in V3 clauses is always given information that can be characterized as a familiar topic (Bech 1998(Bech , 2001Westergaard 2005;Hinterhölzl and Petrova 2009;Speyer 2010;van Kemenade and Milićev 2012), and is rarely prosodically prominent (as far as we are able to determine given our lack of access to spoken OE; Speyer 2010).…”

On the historical core of V2 in Germanic

“…To the best of my knowledge, examples of the kind schematically given in (43) In what follows, I propose an analysis couched within the theoretical model proposed in section 4. This approach shares basic insights with the accounts suggested by van Kemenade (1997) and Haeberli (1999Haeberli ( , 2002, but crucially differs from them in not assuming a universal EPP (which forces the assumption of empty expletives in their analyses, see above). Rather, it is claimed that the diachronic development of an EPP-feature required SpecTP to be overtly filled, thereby disrupting the linear adjacency of clause-initial topics and the finite verb in T. This led to the loss of 'pseudo V2' configurations, giving rise to the familiar V3 topic-constructions of present day English.…”

“…also Hulk & van Kemenade 1995;Haeberli 2002) then go on to argue that the close connection between the loss of V2 and the loss of subjectless structures motivates an analysis that reduces the apparently independent changes to a single diachronic development, namely the loss of expletive pro-drop due to the erosion of verbal inflection. More specifically, Haeberli (1999Haeberli ( , 2002 attributes the decline of superficial V2 orders to the loss of an empty expletive pro that is inserted as specifier of AgrsP in order to satisfy the EPP, thereby blocking overt movement of non-pronominal subjects to this position in OE. He derives the latter change from an independent morphological change that significantly impoverished the verbal agreement morphology in the ME period.…”

Verb-third in early West Germanic: A comparative perspective

“…Pintzuk (1999) took a similar line, in the process noting that examples such as (5) existed in which the object appeared to be proclitic. The existence of examples such as (6) was first brought to light in generative research by Allen (1990: 150-151), and their 6 relative prevalence was established by Haeberli (2002) Pintzuk (1999) or Fuß (2003, positing V-to-T 0 -movement and variation in whether the subject moves to SpecTP, are unenlightening with regard to V3 unless additions are made. Walkden (2009: 60) and Hinterhölzl and Petrova (2009b: 324) proceed to formalize the 7 information-structural patterns in terms of the cartography of the split CP in the tradition of Rizzi (1997).…”