The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and Early Modern Danish embedded-clause word order

Abstract

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of 'rich' subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called 'Rich Agreement Hypothesis' are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500-1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic -not morphological -clues during acquisition.

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis Rehabilitated

“…Swedish becomes poor just after 1500, whereas V-to-Arg movement is lost slowly over the next century (Falk 1993). The development in Danish may have even been slower (Vikner 1997, Sundquist 2003. For English, Lightfoot (1993) and Roberts (1993) have observed a similar gap.…”

Ordstilling i ledsætninger i moderne dansk talesprog

“…En senere undersøgelse af tekster fra 1500 til 1700 foretaget af John D. Sundquist viser samme tendens i udviklingen mht. ordstilling i ledsaetninger (Sundquist 2003).…”

V-to-I and V2 in subordinate clauses: an investigation of Faroese in relation to Icelandic and Danish

“…Synchronically, Icelandic contrasts with the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages in having a high placement of the verb and in having retained an extensive paradigm of agreement on finite verbs that has been entirely lost in the other languages-at least in their standard varieties. Diachronically, the loss of the high position for the finite verb in the history of Swedish and Danish has been argued to track the loss of agreement morphology (Platzack 1988;Platzack and Holmberg 1989;Falk 1993;Holmberg and Platzack 1995), although see comments on the historical data, and in particular on the lag in timing for Danish in Bobaljik (2002), Sundquist (2002Sundquist ( , 2003. Faroese, with an agreement paradigm that is intermediate between the two extremes of 'rich' and absent agreement morphology, furnishes an important additional data point against which the predictions of the various theories about the relation between morphology and syntax can be tested.…”