The nature of Old Spanish verb second reconsidered

Abstract

The view that Old Spanish was a form of verb second (V2) language has been prominently critiqued. Using data from a 14th century Spanish prose text it is argued that (later) Old Spanish in fact provides compelling evidence for a V2 analysis, which assumes head movement of the finite verb into the left periphery of the clause accompanied by merger of a phrasal constituent in the C-layer. V3 matrix clauses involving co-occurrence of a Topic and Focus are not attested in the text and V4 is also not found. On this basis it is argued that Old Spanish is a class of V2 language where the locus of the V2 property is CForce, a high head in the clausal left periphery. Despite the widely held view that Old Spanish was a symmetrical V2 language, evidence from complement clauses is presented that this is not the case. All cases of embedded V2 are found under a class of predicates known to license so-called ‘Main Clause Phenomena’ cross-linguistically. Later Old Spanish thus patterns with Mainland Scandinavian in allowing a restricted class of embedded V2 clauses, therefore precluding a symmetrical V2 analysis.