West Flemish V3 and the interaction of syntax and discourse

The Typology of V2 and the Distribution of Pleonastic die in the Ghent Dialect

“…As shown extensively in Haegeman and Greco ( 2016 , 2018 ), main clause-external adjuncts that give rise to V3 patterns in West Flemish do not reconstruct to lower positions. We refer to Haegeman and Greco ( 2018 ) for full discussion of reconstruction patterns.…”

“…When the antecedent of pleonastic die is a wh -phrase (13), the wh -phrase contributes to the encoding of illocutionary force, and hence it cannot be main clause-external (in the sense of Broekhuis and Corver, 2016 , pp. 1133–1134) or “extra sentential” (Astruc-Aguilera, 2005 ): typically (see Haegeman and Greco, 2018 ), main clause-external constituents are added onto a sentence which already has illocutionary force and they cannot themselves encode the illocutionary force of the associated clause. Only if the antecedent of pleonastic die occupies a clause-internal left-peripheral position will it be able to encode illocutionary force.…”

The asymmetric nature of V2: Evidence from learner languages

“…Nevertheless, an advantage of this analysis is that the precise head hosting the verb may be different depending on the language or dialect in question, suggesting that languages are not identical in terms of which syntactic position the verb occupies in subject-and non-subjectinitial declaratives (cf. Mikkelsen 2015;Haegeman & Greco 2018).…”

“…The present paper will side with Mikkelsen (2015) and Haegeman & Greco (2018) in defending a variational perspective: Varieties differ in terms of whether the symmetric or asymmetric analysis of V2 is correct, and the crucial factor is whether there is evidence in the input for verb movement to a higher position. Previous accounts have mostly relied on monolingual data and arguments of theoretical elegance (economy conditions such as a ban on vacuous movement).…”

“…Generalizing this based on the assumption that there is continuity across the lifespan, it seems natural to assume that monolingual adults also have the same economy principle, causing them to distinguish subject-initial from non-subject-initial declaratives. There is also signifi cant variation in the adult language in terms of how this distinction is implemented into the grammar, i.e., which functional projection the verb moves to, as seen in Bentzen (2014); Wiklund et al (2009); Haegeman & Greco (2018) and Lohndal, Westergaard & Vangsnes (in press). These different realizations are presumably related to the complex nature of the V2 phenomenon, an issue we return to in section 4.…”