Rethinking Verb Second

Abstract

This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O’odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

Verb Second in Old Venetian

“…As previously noted in table 3, these structures, as in (11f), are very rare within our corpus, with only five overall attestations in matrix clauses. It would seem that Informational Focus structures, such as (12), were typical of earlier stages of old Romance whereby their licensing in the later stages of old northern Romance is notably limited, which is in line with similar proposals in more recent literature on the so-called North-South divide within Romance with particular reference to the V2 constraint (Ledgeway 2020(Ledgeway , 2021Wolfe 2020Wolfe , 2021.…”

“…This paper has documented and analysed the extensive data corroborating the presence of a verb second constraint in 14 th century old Venetian. It has been proposed that the text under examination in this paper represents a stage of later old Venetian in which, whilst the V2 constraint still holds and is exemplified by: the general V-to-C raising of the finite verb in matrix contexts, enclisis of clitics in V1 orders, and ben fronting, we observe that this constraint is nonetheless restricted, following on from recent proposals for the later stages of old northern Romance (Ledgeway 2020(Ledgeway , 2021Wolfe 2020;. Namely, it has been proposed that the V2 constraint was being lost at this stage of later old Venetian documented through: the infrequency of Information Fronting in CP, whereby rhematic objects, are most felicitously licensed post-verbally, the low number of scrambling structures, the argued incipient cliticisation of subject pronouns, and the V-to-T movement found in embedded clauses.…”

“…The data sample was taken from Grignani and Sanfilippo's (1975) critical edition stage of old Venetian in which we can observe a gradual loss of the V2 constraint, following similar proposals by Benincà (1983) and Wolfe (2018) for later old Venetian and following a trend of recent proposals identifying old northern Romance as having a much more restricted V2 constraint (Ledgeway 2020(Ledgeway , 2021Wolfe 2020Wolfe , 2021). This will be documented through the loss of Informational Focus in CP, the loss of scrambling, the development of subject clitics, and V-to-T raising in embedded clauses.…”

“…Within this section, we discuss the more common syntactic phenomena caused by the V2 constraint that we can use as diagnostics against which to corroborate the presence of said V2 constraint within a given medieval Romance variety or text. These diagnostics will later be used when qualitatively analysing the data from later old Venetian to propose that, whilst V-to-C raising still holds in various contexts in matrix clauses, this is at a low frequency such to suggest that the constraint is being lost (see Benincà 1983 andWolfe 2018 for similar proposals for later old Venetian), especially in light of recent proposals that point towards a more robust and uniform V2 constraint in earlier old (northern) Romance in which the phenomena that follow are highly attested (Ledgeway 2020(Ledgeway , 2021Wolfe 2020Wolfe , 2021.…”

“…Arguably, however, Informational Focus in CP is a diagnostic best considered in the context of diachronic and diatopic variation. Namely, as Ledgeway (2008Ledgeway ( , 2021, Poletto (2014), Wolfe (2018Wolfe ( , 2020Wolfe ( , 2021, et al, have noticed, it would seem that this strategy was more prevalent in earlier old northern Romance varieties, later being lost as they moved towards more fixed SVO orders through the loss of the V2 constraint. Notably, a few modern southern Romance varieties have retained this strategy: Sicilian, Sardinian, and Daco-Romanian (See Jones 1993;Cruschina 2006;Cruschina & Remberger 2009; Remberger 2010) 9 .…”