Verb-third in early West Germanic: A comparative perspective

Walkden, George

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199687923.003.0014

Cited by 54 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This conclusion is not inescapable, as it relies on diachronic parsimony in the absence of any evidence about the likely direction of the change. However, if we can identify a scenario in which strict V2 is likely to give way to V3, and we can show that scenario was present in the earliest stages of OE, then the case can be made that the development was the opposite of what Walkden (2014Walkden ( , 2015 suggests.…”

Section: V2 and V3 In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The prehistory of OE word order is not a settled matter. While most authors now accept that the verb must have moved to the C-domain in main clauses at an earlier stage (Hinterhölzl and Petrova 2009;Speyer 2010: 217-227;Walkden 2014Walkden , 2015, views differ on whether V3 was an innovation (Westergaard 2005;Hinterhölzl and Petrova 2009) or a retention (Walkden 2014(Walkden , 2015. The comparative evidence is not conclusive: among the earlier Northwest Germanic languages, strict V2 is found in Scandinavian texts from the earliest records onwards, and in Old Saxon and most Old High German texts, as well as in tenth-century Northumbrian Old English and northern Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 1997).…”

Section: V2 and V3 In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Walkden

2017

J Comp German Linguistics

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Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronic analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar-a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.

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Section: V2 and V3 In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: V2 and V3 In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Walkden

2017

J Comp German Linguistics

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“…2 Similar exceptions to V2 have also been noted for historic varieties of other West Germanic languages, including Middle High German (Tomaselli 1995), Old Saxon, and Middle Low German (Petrova 2012;Walkden 2015).…”

Section: (12)mentioning

confidence: 58%

“…To address this issue of variation, Poletto (2002;, Walkden (2015), and Wolfe (2015;to appear) propose that languages can vary in the 6 Several of the examples given by Poletto and those in Wolfe's corpus consist of sentences where the verb is clause-final, potentially suggesting an analysis in which the verb is located in a head-final C-domain or Infl-domain projection. However, such a proposal would be dubious for several reasons, as suggested by two anonymous reviewers.…”

Section: V>3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Verb second and its deviations: An argument for feature scattering in the left periphery

Hsu

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This article focuses on the analysis of verb-second (V2) requirements in light of evidence that the clausal left periphery contains a series of functional projections in a fixed hierarchy (Rizzi 1997;Benincà & Poletto 2004; among many others). I discuss previous approaches to V2, the bottleneck effect and stacked head theories, and argue that they are generally unable to account for a variety of "relaxed" V2 systems that allow V3 or V4 in some contexts. I propose a new analysis of variation in the strictness of V2 in terms of the feature scattering hypothesis (Giorgi & Pianesi 1996); languages can vary in the number of functional category features that are bundled on individual heads. This allows a straightforward account for the attested typology of relaxed V2 systems, and a new explanation for cross-linguistic variation in the instantiation of functional projections.Keywords: syntax; verb-second word order; bottleneck effect; feature scattering The cartographic program and the problem of restricted instantiationFollowing Rizzi (1997) a variety of evidence has emerged to suggest that the left edge of the clause, the traditional complementizer phrase, contains additional internal structure. Numerous works within the cartographic approach propose that rather than a single projection, the left edge of the clause includes a series of distinct functional projections, collectively referred to as the extended left periphery. These functional heads perform the various functions of complementizer-like elements, generally related to clause typing and the encoding of information structure. While the body of research within the approach has given rise to many proposed structures, we will consider for illustrative purposes the "core"

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“…23 By contrast, in languages of the latter type, including early Germanic, medieval Romance and, as we shall see, late Latin, only V-movement proves obligatory, with variable application of fronting of one or more sentential constituents such that the purely superficial descriptive V2 constraint is not invariably met. Indeed, from a historical perspective the oft-cited rigid characterizations of the V2 constraint represent only a very recent innovation within a small subset of modern Germanic and Raeto-Romance varieties, the original situation in the Indo-European proto-language (witness the comparative evidence of Vedic, Greek, Hittite, early Germanic, and early Romance) being that of a broader V2 type with at least two left-peripheral (preverbal) positions (Kiparsky 1995;Walkden 2014Walkden , 2015. The (broad) V2 nature of late Latin finds further confirmation in the distribution of finite verbs in embedded contexts reported in Table 2.…”

Section: Some Superficial Empirical Generalizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the “Itinerarium Egeriae”

Ledgeway

2017

catjl

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In this article we undertake a systematic study of the Itinerarium Egeriae, one of the best known late Latin texts, to determine the proper characterization of the word order of the text and to consider in particular whether the Itinerarium Egeriae can legitimately be considered to present a verb-second (V2) grammar on the par with the well-studied grammars of medieval Romance. The results, based on detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the text and, where relevant, appropriate comparisons with medieval Romance, confirm the innovative nature of the syntax of the Itinerarium Egeriae whose word order patterns are shown to follow an asymmetric V2 constraint. The article therefore offers valuable original evidence for the often claimed, but hitherto unproven, hypothesis that the V2 syntax of medieval Romance represents the continuation of a parametric setting already well established in the grammar of late Latin. En aquest article duem a terme un estudi sistemàtic de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, un dels textos del llatí tardà més ben coneguts, per tal de determinar la caracterització adequada de l'ordre de mots del text i veure, en particular, si l'Itinerarium Egeriae es pot considerar legítimament que presenta una gramàtica de verb segon (V2) de manera semblant a les gramàtiques ben estudiades del romànic medieval. Els resultats, basats en detallades anàlisis quantitatives i qualitatives del text i, on és pertinent, en comparacions adequades amb el romànic medieval, confirmen la naturalesa innovadora de la sintaxi de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, els patrons d'ordre de mots de la qual es demostra que segueixen una restricció asimètrica de V2. L'article, per tant, ofereix evidència original i valuosa a favor de la hipòtesi sovint proposada però fins ara no demostrada que la sintaxi V2 del romànic medieval representa la continuació d'una fixació paramètrica ja ben establerta en la gramàtica del llatí tardà.Paraules clau: Verb segon (V2); llatí tardà; ordre de paraules; perifèria esquerra; romànic medieval; Tobler-Mussafia * I thank two anonymous reviewers and Jim Adams, Paola Benincà, Theresa Biberauer, Federica Cognola and Nigel Vincent for their valuable comments and observations on a previous version of this article.

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Verb-third in early West Germanic: A comparative perspective

Cited by 54 publications

References 23 publications

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Verb second and its deviations: An argument for feature scattering in the left periphery

Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the “Itinerarium Egeriae”

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