V2 Languages Research Articles

Topic and focus in Old French V1 and V2 structures

AbstractThe hypothesis that Old French was not a verb-second (V2) language, but rather a Topic-initial language, is evaluated in a corpus of verb initial (V1) and V2 matrix clauses extracted from a corpus of 12th- and 13th-century texts. It is shown that the initial constituent of V2 clauses is not always a Topic; it may be part of the informational Focus, or it could be an element that is neither Topic nor Focus. In addition, in V1 and V2 sentences with subject inversion, the postverbal subject may be an informational Topic, contrary to the hypothesis that subjects must move to the preverbal position to avoid being interpreted as part of the informational Focus. Therefore, from an Information-Structure point of view, Old French is similar to a standard V2 language like German. However, certain differences between 12th- and 13th-century texts could suggest that the use of the left periphery evolved during the period considered.

The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses

AbstractOld French (OF) is often characterized as a Germanic-style asymmetric V2 language, although this characterization is often questioned. The present study evaluates the nature of OF V2 from a quantitative perspective. An extensive set of data provided by syntactically annotated corpora shows that both IP and CP structure change over the OF period. Focusing on Germanic inversion – XVS word order – I argue that most of the attested inversion in OF occurs within an elaborated IP structure and that this type of subject inversion dwindles over time due to the decreasing use of null expletives. True Germanic-style embedded V2 does not appear until the late 12thcentury, and is only rarely used throughout the 13thcentury. Thus, OF is an asymmetric V2 language, but with a difference, namely in having an IP field that allows for apparent V2 orders and a CP field that is only marginally employed.

Transitive expletive constructions in Swedish

This article discusses the existence of transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in Swedish. It is often claimed that TECs are a distinctive feature of Insular Scandinavian, but do not exist in Mainland Scandinavian. In this article, however, it is shown that such constructions do occur throughout the history of Swedish and, to some extent, still occur in present-day Swedish, although nowadays the language has none of the features previously proposed as licensing TECs. It is also shown that Swedish has a broader repertoire of associate subjects in TECs than does Icelandic. Unlike in Icelandic, associate subjects can also be definite in Swedish. The presence of TECs in Swedish calls into question the previous analysis of the licensing of this construction, and in this article a new explanation for the phenomenon is proposed. It is claimed that TECs are possible if the expletive can merge in a position structurally higher than the canonical subject position. In the case of V2 languages, this implies that expletives must be able to merge in Spec,CP, and it is shown that in Swedish they are able to merge in this position.

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

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.

On Berbice Dutch VO status

Berbice Dutch, once the vernacular of the Dutch-owned Berbice and Canje plantation areas of what is now Guyana (South America), is a VO language, even though both its substrate (Ijo, the Kalaḅarị variety in particular) and its superstrate (16th and 17th century Dutch) are taken to be OV (and Verb Second (V2)) languages. Along the lines of Bickerton's Bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton, 1984, et seq), some universalist analyses have taken Berbice Dutch to be a perfect illustration of OV markedness. Following Kayne's Lexical Correspondence Axiom that states that every language exhibits an underlying VO order and that OV orders are the result of additional object shifts (cf. Kayne, 1994), many scholars have taken OV languages to be syntactically more complex than VO languages. The emergence of Berbice Dutch VO would then be a reflex of a reduction of the complexity of a creole language in comparison to its substrate and superstrate languages (cf. Roberts, 1999).In this article we argue that Kalaḅarị, unlike previous claims, is actually not a V2 language and that therefore the Berbice Dutch substrate language differs from its superstrate in not allowing surface VO structures. This, we subsequently argue, opens up the way to analyze the emergence of Berbice Dutch VO as a result of the interplay between first and second language acquisition. We conclude that VO word orders are actually likely to emerge in the Berbice Dutch contact situation and that, therefore, Berbice Dutch VO status does not constitute evidence in favor of Bickerton's universalism or similar approaches (in line with Mufwene's, 2001 and DeGraff's, 2001, 2003 arguments against creole exceptionalism), nor in favor of an alleged universal VO base order.In short, Berbice Dutch VO may directly result from the fact that Kalaḅarị speakers would not recognize Dutch V2, as their native language lacked it, and that therefore they analyzed SVO orders resulting from V2 as plain VO orders. Children growing up at the plantation would then take this input as evidence for a VO target language. We furthermore argue that such a reanalysis of OV + V2 structures as VO structures by children, both in main and embedded clauses, got facilitated by the existence of so-called VO leakages in 16th and 17th century Dutch (along the lines of Weerman, 1993).

ON ESTABLISHING COREFERENCE IN LEFT DISLOCATION CONSTRUCTIONS

The phenomenon of left dislocation (LD) has received relatively little attention in the generative literature. In Government & Binding theory and early versions of Minimalist Syntax, the left-dislocated expression is conventionally taken to be base-generated in its sentence-initial surface position and the resumptive pronoun in some other position in the structure. The establishment of an (obligatory) coreferential relationship between these expressions is usually ascribed to a special binding mechanism, A-bar binding, though this issue is seldom explicitly addressed in LD studies. The aim of this paper is to present, in broad outline, an alternative analysis of LD constructions, one that incorporates the core hypotheses of the nominal shell analysis of coreferential constructions put forward by Oosthuizen (2013a,b). On this analysis, the resumptive pronoun and the referring expression that is to serve as its antecedent are base-generated in a nominal shell structure which is headed by a presentational focus light noun, a functional category belonging to a natural class of identificational elements. The coreferential relationship between the two expressions is established within this structure by means of phi-feature valuation. The antecedent is subsequently raised into the left-periphery of the sentence, where it surfaces as the left-dislocated expression. It is claimed that such an analysis can account for the phenomenon of obligatory coreferentiality in LD constructions in terms of formal devices that are either already provided by or compatible with the basic assumptions and concepts of Minimalist Syntax. A tentative proposal is also put forward to account for the word order in LD constructions, specifically for the fact that left-dislocation does not bring about (surface) subject-verb inversion in V2 languages such as Afrikaans.

Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French by Michael Zimmermann

Reviews 287 majorité reveals a tendency among young French speakers (ages fourteen and fifteen) toward plural verbs. They used a plural verb in 66.67% of cases, as compared to 56.25% for adults over sixty (87). She also found that definite and indefinite articles influence agreement: older speakers use a singular verb with la foule 100% of the time, but only 64.29% with une foule (93). Tristram’s review of the historical use of collective nouns shows variation over time. Through the eighteenth century, for example, use of plural verbs rose from 12.5% of cases to 37.31% and then declined to 31.78% (99). Her examination of twentieth-century grammar textbooks found that they approached verbal agreement with collective nouns flexibly, with no apparent change over time. This book undertakes so much that the reader sometimes feels lost in its multifaceted methodology and lengthy endnotes.A more straightforward research design and more concise writing style, along with more examples and discussions focused specifically on the results, would have helped to put the grammar in context and done greater justice to Tristram’s tremendous effort and rich data. Nonetheless, her book is an interesting invitation to learn about morphosyntactic variation in French using a variety of methodologies and corpora. Manhattan College (NY) Samira Hassa Zimmermann, Michael. Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. ISBN 978-3-11-037337-0. Pp. 246. 100 a. This monograph is a meticulous, corpus-based examination of the expression and non-expression of expletive and referential subject pronouns in Old and Middle French, which are often considered pro-drop or null-subject languages. The corpus represents a selection of 1,500 root and embedded clauses from the Chanson de Roland and twelve prose texts ranging from the mid-twelfth to mid-seventeenth centuries and chosen at roughly fifty-year intervals. The results of this well-defined diachronic database of 19,500 manually analyzed clauses are displayed throughout the book in over forty coherent, easy-to-read graphs, showing that Medieval French is clearly not a symmetrical V2 language; that the expression of subject pronouns is more frequent in embedded than in root clauses; and that even though by the end of the seventeenth century subject pronouns are consistently expressed, their increase is neither constant nor linear over the five centuries analyzed. After demonstrating how all previous approaches to the non-expression of subject pronouns (for example, V2, borrowing, disambiguation, grammaticalization) are either “highly problematic” or “empirically inadequate” (44–109), Zimmermann presents a solid argument for analyzing Old French as a non-pro-drop or non-null-subject language, which nonetheless allows the non-expression of subject pronouns in specific structural conditions, for example, the context of left-peripheral focalization (110–205). Zimmermann attributes the sudden abandonment of the non-expression of subject pronouns in Classical French to extralinguistic reasons: influential works of seventeenth-century grammarians (Maupas, Vaugelas, Chiflet) insisting upon the consistent expression of subject pronouns, along with strict SVX word order. When writers and eventually native speakers of the time followed, movement of the verb to the left periphery in the contexts of focalization was no longer allowed. Among alternative focalization strategies, Zimmermann suggests “cleft and dislocation constructions which in fact show an increase in frequency in the 17th century”(216). Like the graphs, the numerous linguistic examples throughout are remarkably accessible: each French word is accurately glossed in English, followed by an overall translation, and in several cases by a detailed contextual analysis of the preverbal constituents considered“focus elements.” Furthermore, this monograph is highly accessible to the non-French reader: the author consistently distinguishes relevant features in his linguistic examples, using italics for verbs, boldface for subject pronouns, underscore for constituents preceding the verb or pronoun, and dotted lines for preceding elements not considered relevant (clitics and coordinating conjunctions). Zimmermann even provides translations of all citations (with the original French or German quotations in footnotes), and many examples and some graphs are conveniently repeated, avoiding the need to thumb back for previous examples to follow an occasional arduous argument. The style varies from somewhat engaging in the introductory chapters to fairly dry in the...

The nature of Old Spanish verb second reconsidered

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.

How to define relaxed V2 languages and how to distinguish them from non-V2 languages: A reply to Brandtler (2014)

This paper provides evidence for the idea that relaxed verb-second (V2) languages exist and exhibt specific properties which distinguish them from both strict V2 and non-V2 languages. The identification of the relaxed subtype of V2 languages implies that V2 should not be understood as a linear restriction, but as an abstract rule involving the movement of the finite verb to a head of the left periphery in all main clauses.

O Efeito V2 na história do espanhol e português europeus

We approach the loss of the V2 effect in the history of Spanish and European Portuguese. In this context, we discuss what we understand as Verb Second, assuming that the V2 order involves verb movement to CP. We then argue why we analyze Old Spanish as well as Old and Classical Portuguese as V2 languages and present possible causes of such language change. Finally, we comment on how language contact in Iberia may have influenced language change in both languages.

Postverbal subjects in Old English and Old French

Both Old English and Old French are commonly described as V2 languages. We investigate the position of the postverbal subject based on a corpus of medieval texts with respect to syntax and information structure. Our main findings are that information structure plays a more important role in Old English than in Old French.

Erwerb morphosyntaktischer Fähigkeiten im Hinblick auf die Konstituentenverschiebung in die Komplementiererposition

German is a genuine verb-second (V2) language. For V2 languages it is assumed that all sentence structures can be derived from the underlying subordinate clause structure via the movement of individual components. The acquisition of German V2 structures represents a critical step in German first language acquisition and is usually mastered at the age of 3years. However, not all children succeed in filtering the necessary information from the spoken input in order to acquire this key component of German syntax. Use of canonical sentence structures alone is not a confirmation of a successful V2 acquisition. Moreover, this structure often represents some kind of interim grammar. Only the use of complementizer phrase (CP)-related structures, such as wh-questions or topicalizations of objects is a real indication of a successful V2 acquisition.

The functions of subjectless declarative main clauses in spoken Swedish

Swedish is a V2 language in which verb forms do not express number or person. Subject expression is the general pattern. Subjectless clauses do nonetheless occur both in spoken and written Swedish. This paper explores subjectless declarative main clauses in conversational data. The analysis is based on 77 occurrences in eight conversations from two different corpora. The subjectless clauses occur in four types of contexts: comments on the situation or discourse, elaborations, final points or evaluations and brief responses. The analysis shows that speakers use subjectless clauses when they react to something said or done in the situation, but at the same time they avoid contributing (too much) topical substance. The clauses are used in situations where some kind of break occurs and cohesion needs to be marked. In their situated contexts, the clauses have a number of closely-related functions, such as drawing a conclusion based on the preceding discourse, making a point implicitly conveyed explicit, providing additional background parenthetically, aligning with other speakers and providing a minimal response to a request or question. The study thus shows that subjectless clauses are an established conversational practice in Swedish and are used in certain types of communicative situations.

Information structural transfer in advanced Dutch EFL writing

This article presents a case study on the role of L1 transfer of language-specific features of information structure in very advanced L2 learners. Cross-linguistic differences in the information status of clause-initial position in a V2 language like Dutch compared to an SVO language like English are hypothesized to result in overuse of clause-initial adverbials in the writing of advanced Dutch learners of English. This hypothesis was tested by evaluating advanced Dutch EFL learners’ use of clause-initial adverbials in a syntactically annotated longitudinal corpus of student writing, compared to a native reference corpus. Results indicate that Dutch EFL learners overuse clause-initial adverbials of place as well as addition adverbials that refer back to an antecedent in the directly preceding discourse. Although there is a clear development in the direction of native writing, transfer of information structural features of Dutch can still be observed even after three years of extended academic exposure.

Exploring embedded main clause phenomena: The irrelevance of factivity and some challenges from V2 languages

Exploring embedded main clause phenomena: The irrelevance of factivity and some challenges from V2 languages

V1 or V2?: On the left in Niuean

This paper presents an analysis of word order in Niuean, a Polynesian language traditionally considered to be V1. The central issue explored is: what are the relations between languages traditionally described as V1 and those traditionally described as V2? Landing sites, motivations for movement, and movement types are compared, and although at first glance the language types seem different, many common points can be discerned. Particular attention is paid to whether Niuean, a language in which tense does not appear on the verb but rather as a separate constituent, can fit into recent hypotheses that both V1 and V2 languages arise through an attempt to avoid verb-first (*V-1) or tense-first (*T-1) orders. The conclusion is that it can, in spite of appearances, but several tricky issues emerge regarding the definition of “first”. For example, neither *V-1 nor *T-1 can be a simple phonological constraint, and it becomes evident that to determine the validity of the two constraints we need a clearer understanding of the visibility (or not) of different types of elements including null and syncretic morphemes.

Typological guidance in the acquisition of V2 Dutch

The main issue of the paper will be the identification of the clause-initial finite verbs as C o in Celtic as well as in Germanic. Framing C o as the core point of V1 and V2 types of languages will here be justified by an acquisitional analysis of V<+fin>-to-C o in Dutch. The background of this argument will be Jakobson's (1942) thesis that there is a hierarchy of typological features and that this hierarchy will show up in language acquisition. Some properties of grammar are of course acquired before others, but, more interestingly, the major typological properties of grammar are invariably the first to be acquired. They happen to serve as the acquisitional basis for the more language-specific properties of grammar. Typological properties survive so well in the history of grammar, because they are the system's bootstrap for learnability. The successive acquisition steps indicate how grammar is built up by input-control in a flexible way. In a first step, Celtic V1 and Germanic V2 share the basic property of a clause-typing head V<+fin> in C o. The acquisition data suggest that finiteness, not tense, must be the trigger for verb movement. The subject obligation, as well as tense and agreement markings come in after verb movement. The subject obligation seems to get underlined, rather than to be derived from uninterpretable phi-features. The last section discusses the growing importance of Spec.C in Dutch and the typological difference this will cause between V1 and V2 languages.

On verb second and the så-construction in two Mainland Scandinavian contact situations

Data from areas of long term language contact situations between a non-V2 language and a V2 language in Northern Norway reveal unstable use of V2. Furthermore, in a substantial portion of the data there is a notable presence of the particle &lt;em&gt;så&lt;/em&gt;. These facts are discussed in light of data on the &lt;em&gt;så&lt;/em&gt;-construction in Standard Norwegian and Finland Swedish, and the particle &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; in Finnish. We suggest that some aspects of &lt;em&gt;så&lt;/em&gt; in the data may be explained as one trait of L1 transfer, where the acquirer recruits existing L2 elements and assigns to them new tasks in the grammar. The data reveal interesting variation patterns, which may be taken to support the “Underspecified CP” hypothesis put forth in recent language acquisition research.

Response article Full transfer vs. developmentally moderated transfer: a reply to Bohnacker

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Håkansson et al.'s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The article by Håkansson et al. presented empirical evidence from a similar population of learners (native language Swedish, target language German), showing that V2 is not transferred at the initial state. Unfortunately, Bohnacker misrepresents key aspects of our work on L1 transfer and, paradoxically, her own data constitute empirical evidence supporting our position, as we show in this response.

English as a Mixed V2 Grammar: Synchronic Word Order Inconsistencies from the Perspective of First Language Acquisition

English as a Mixed V2 Grammar: Synchronic Word Order Inconsistencies from the Perspective of First Language Acquisition This paper discusses some word order inconsistencies found in present-day English and argues that these may be explained by natural processes in first language acquisition. English is usually assumed to have lost its verb-second (V2) properties in the Middle English period, but the paper argues that English should be considered a mixed V2 grammar, as subject-auxiliary inversion is still a syntactic requirement in all questions and a type of inversion also marginally appears in certain declaratives (with informationally light verbs). Discussing word order variation across Germanic V2 languages as well as some acquisition data, the paper develops an approach to language acquisition and change which is based on micro-cues expressed in the input. This means that there are many types of V2 grammars, which distinguish between different clause types, patterns of information structure, and natural classes of categories. In this model, historical gradualism is seen as successive changes affecting one micro-cue at a time, and the mixed V2 property of English is considered to represent no exceptional case, simply a somewhat more restricted V2 grammar than that of the other Germanic languages.